


The Fearful Joy (that Ever Slips away so Quickly)

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Beauty - Freeform, Childbirth, Doubt, Duty, F/M, Falling In Love, Fatherhood, Gen, Grief, Happily Ever After, Hope, Loss, Marriage, Motherhood, Pregnancy, Promise, Suicide, discussion of abuse, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-01-17 13:37:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Jon and Thayet fall in love slowly.





	1. The Interest

“The life so brief, the art so long in learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly—by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation that when I think on it I scare know whether I wake or sleep.”—Geoffrey Chaucer

The Fearful Joy (that Ever Slips away so Quickly) 

The Interest 

It was a new and unpleasant feeling for Jon to not be happy to see his oldest and best friend, Gary of Naxen, walk into his private study, which, far from being a refuge from the pressures of ruling was where they were most intense since there was no need for pretense away from public scrutiny, because he knew that Gary wasn’t meeting him as a friend, but as a Prime Minster. 

“Let’s start with the good news first.” Jon pinched the bridge of his nose as Gary sank into an upholstered chair and settled a tower of documents on the gleaming mahogany table with a rustle. The rolls of parchment were precariously perched and on the verge of toppling over just like the realm Jon was now supposed to be ruling. Swallowing the hysteria that suddenly rose in his throat, because he would not descend into insanity as his father had, even if the prospect of riding off a cliff to escape the stresses of kingship sounded dangerously appealing at the moment, Jon added grimly, “Assuming there is any, of course.” 

“There is,” Gary assured him, rummaging through the stack of scrolls. “I just have to dig a bit to find it. Ah, yes, we have received word of projected harvest yields from more fiefs today. The lords of Vikison Lake, Runnerspring, and Rosemark have all reported that they anticipate average crop yields.” 

The idea that average crop yields were considered good news rather than no news was just a bitter reminder that there was a famine in the realm. A famine he had caused when he held the earth together with the Dominion Jewel, the energy for that powerful magic feat sapped from the seeds planted by peasants who were probably currently cursing his name as they faced starvation. 

“How many fiefs sent their anticipated crop yields to us today, Gary?” Jon clutched the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles turned white as polished ivory. 

“Ten,” answered Gary, who sounded as if he might have memorized the information. Perhaps he had. Ever since they were children, Gary had possessed an extraordinary memory for facts, figures, and details. “Five report projected yields fifteen percent lower than average, and two report an anticipated harvest ten percent less than usual.” 

“That means seven of ten fiefs are dealing with an impending famine.” Shaking his head, Jon sighed. “That’s not good news. Try again.” 

“Lord Imrah of Legann has sent word from Port Legann on the status of his negotiations with the Tyran bankers.” Gary’s forehead furrowed as he pulled out another piece of correspondence. “He writes that he has managed to drop their interest rate for the loan to the Crown from thirty-six percent to twenty percent…” 

“Which is still extortion.” Jon scowled. 

“Bankers are sharks, Jon.” Gary’s tone was dark. “If they smell blood, they attack. Unfortunately, we do need their money if we hope to avoid a devastating precipitous drop in population due to famine, which obviously would not only damage the realm in the present but in the future. It can take years for a realm to recover from famine but even longer to recover from a marked decline in population. Population drives the economy and vice versa.” 

“I realize we need their money.” Jon’s scowl hardened into a full-fledged glower. “Worse still, they realize it, and that’s why they are exploiting our desperation to charge such exorbitant interest rates.” 

“What are you suggesting?” Gary arched an eyebrow in a gesture that made him resemble his stern father too much for Jon’s comfort. Maybe everybody was doomed to become their father, Jon thought and shivered despite the blazing fire in the hearth. “Should I instruct Lord Imrah to walk away from the negotiation table or threaten to do so?” 

Jon paused to internally debate the merits of such strategies, and then, deciding for what felt like the hundredth time that day that he had no notion what to do, he replied crisply, “Lord Imrah is the great tactician, not me. Tell him to do whatever he deems necessary to lower the offered interest rate another five percent. Fifteen percent interest rate is ludicrously high but not outrageously so though mind you I have no idea how we’ll pay back the interest without taking out more loans from somebody else, which might beggar the kingdom again.” 

“You’re right but let’s not worry about tomorrow’s problems today.” Gary, busy scribbling a note on Lord Imrah’s letter, did not glance up at Jon. “Today has enough problems of its own without borrowing any from tomorrow.” 

“True.” Jon massaged his throbbing temples. “We will be borrowing enough from the future without borrowing tomorrow’s problems as well.” 

“Such wisdom, sire.” For the first time that evening, there was a flicker of humor in Gary’s chestnut eyes. 

Needing a best friend more than a Prime Minister at that moment, Jon responded with a wry twist of his lips, “Believe it or not, Gary, I have been doing even deeper thinking than that.” 

“Ah, and what would be the subject of these exalted contemplations?” Gary chuckled, abandoning his papers as he focused his entire attention on Jon. 

“Marriage.” Jon leaned back in his chair, conjuring an image of Thayet in his head, because just thinking of her made a soothing warmth blossom in his chest. There was a woman born to be queen: poised, smart, and breathtakingly beautiful. The only question was if she would consent to being his queen. He still didn’t know—and his ignorance both titillated and infuriated him—whether she agreed to dance, ride, and generally be in his presence because she had friendly or romantic feelings for him or if she was just being polite to the ruler of the kingdom where she had taken sanctuary. 

“Marriage.” A dreamy cast overcame Gary’s brown gaze, and, without asking, Jon knew that Gary was reflecting on his new wife, Cythera, who already had the pink roses of her first pregnancy blooming in her cheeks though she had not yet started to show in any other fashion. “A marvelous institution. We are truly indebted to our ancestors for devising it…” 

“I was hoping to discuss marriage to a particular woman, not marriage in general.” Jon cut off Gary’s mooning musing in favor of his own. “A king needs a queen. We should find one for me.” 

“I suppose we should start searching for a princess with the brain damage required to agree to marry you.” Gary smirked as Jon rolled his eyes in a manner that was leagues away from regal. “I heard the most scurrilous rumors that one of the Gallan princesses was dropped on her head as a baby, Jon, so perhaps she is the perfect princess for you.” 

“Speaking of heads, I have the overwhelming urge to boil yours.” Jon emitted an undignified snort, and then went on haughtily, “Not that you deserve to know, but I’m considering a princess from Sarain, not Galla.” 

“I know.” Gary’s demeanor was so smug that Jon battled the desire to throw a scroll at his snickering face. “The whole court knows, Jon. You haven’t exactly been subtle in your interest in the charming Princess Thayet. Just order a ring made and propose to her already. You won’t shock anyone, and this realm could use the excuse to celebrate that a royal wedding provides.” 

“We won’t be able to afford a lavish party.” Jon’s lips thinned, because if the kingdom was reduced to borrowing money to feed its people, coins should not be wasted on elaborate weddings and feasts. He would not be the king who hosted grand celebrations while his people worried about their next meal. 

“We will and we must.” Gary’s chin lifted in a way that announced more plainly than words that he would not back down. “It’s a matter of state, where the people must see their king and queen strong and happy. There must be some grandeur and rejoicing even in times of struggle, because people need joy, and, more than that, they have to release the tension hard times create in ways we provide, or else they will do so in ways we cannot condone such as crime or even revolt.” 

“Fine.” Jon was too tired to argue about being paraded in costume in front of the country again, and if Thayet was parading beside him as his queen that would make whatever ceremony the state demanded perfect. “Don’t go planning the wedding yet. Remember the princess in question hasn’t even consented to the marriage.”


	2. The Pursuit

The Pursuit

“Riding side saddle again, I see.” Buri shot Thayet a sidelong glance as Thayet gathered her silk dress—today a laurel green that she hoped would bring out the similar hues in her hazel eyes because her survival in this strange land was entirely dependent on her ability to be attractive to its still strange inhabitants—and graciously accepted a stable boy’s proffered hand to mount her silver mare although she was confident that she could have done so without his assistance. 

Deciding that Buri’s snide comment did not technically require a response and did not deserve to be dignified with one, Thayet focused her attention on the stable boy instead. Smiling her thanks, she slipped a coin between his fingers as a token of her appreciation, earning her a low bow and murmured “Your Highness” from the starstruck stable lad. 

Nudging her horse forward, Buri tossed a teasing look over her shoulder at Thayet. “Poor lad. He doesn’t know that he’s competing with a crowned king for your affections, and in the classic battle of king versus stable boy, king always wins.” 

“Keep your voice down.” Thayet spurred her mare to a trot so that she could catch up to her too-bold friend. She looked about her at the collection of courtiers that Jon—the King of Tortall, Thayet reminded herself sternly because to fall into familiarity was dangerous—had invited on a picnic. Fortunately, most of the nobles appeared to entrenched in gossiping and scheming with their own companions to worry about what sort of scandalous things the savage K’miri outsiders were saying to one another. Thayet couldn’t figure out if she should be grateful or resentful about that. “The king isn’t interested in earning my affection. All I can offer him is a tenuous title that is lesser than his own. I can’t even bring him a substantial dowry as one of his own nobles could, and he’ll need gold out of his ears if the rumors of impending famine are true.” 

“I don’t think he’s interested in your title.” Buri’s smirk was wicked, and Thayet wondered how she had offended the Horse Lords so much that they gave her a friend who delighted in tormenting her. “You must know that, though, or you wouldn’t be riding side saddle.”

“I’m not trying to impress Jon by riding side saddle.” Thayet gritted her teeth and clutched her reigns so tightly that her knuckles hurt in order to resist the urge to punch Buri on the nose. 

“Of course not.” Buri’s tone was far too innocent to mean anything but trouble. “You’re trying to impress his flock of preening peacocks.” 

“That has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with politics.” Thayet shook her head briskly and tried not to think about the fact that the butterflies that sometimes took flight in her stomach when Jon’s eyes, blue as the sky on a clear and crisp morning in the Sarain highlands, were definitely not political in origin. “You don’t understand politics any better than your horse does, but it might do you well to realize that when we are taking refuge in a strange land, we have to adhere to their customs or they might decide that they don’t want to suffer our presence any longer.” 

“With a princess and a king, it’s never about romance and always about politics, I’m certain of that much.” Buri snorted, sounding uncannily like her horse and Thayet bit back a laugh at the idea. “By the way, if you are such a political mastermind, I marvel that it hasn’t occurred to you that if the king loves you, it doesn’t matter what his nobles think of you. You will always be welcome in any country where the king is head over heels for you.”

“Head over heels?” Thayet grinned, as amused as ever by Buri’s blunt assessments of even the most exalted personages in Tortall. “You make him sound unbalanced, Buri.” 

“I’m not saying he’s crazy as that Copper Island princess who went all homicidal maniac.” Buri suddenly didn’t sound as if she were joking, which was just as well, because Thayet knew it was too soon for anyone—even somebody as irreverent as Buri—to find humor in the horror that had transpired on coronation day. “But that resurrected cousin of his was definitely a terrifying lunatic. A strain of insanity could run in the Conte line.”

“If his advisers are aware of my mother throwing herself from her tower, they will probably be whispering the same things in his ears about the taint of madness corrupting my blood.” Thayet rubbed at her nose, as she always did when she was feeling self-conscious about herself and her K’miri ancestry. “They’ll be saying that someone of my blood is not a fit consort for the King of Tortall.” 

“I have it on good authority from no less a person than the Commander of the King’s Own that he is too headstrong to listen to his advisors.” Buri arched an eyebrow. “Another way that he is like you. Neither of you recognize sense when you hear it.” 

“Ah, yes, you and Raoul of Goldenlake are founts of wisdom.” Thayet’s lips twisted ironically. 

“Founts of wisdom?” A baritone that Thayet recognized with a start as the king’s, and, before Thayet could blink, he was riding alongside her. “When do I have the pleasure of meeting these paragons?” 

“That remains to be seen, Your Majesty.” Thayet’s cheeks burned like embers as she wondered how much of their conversation the king might have overheard. “When you meet them, though, they will probably explain to you that it is most ill-mannered to interrupt a conversation of which you are not a part.” 

“It would be even more uncouth for a host to fail to greet his honored guests.” The king bowed to her and Buri, and the embers in Thayet’s cheeks blazed into roaring flames. “It’s a matter of precedent, Your Highness, and nobody understands precedent better than kings since we have to hear about it every day.” 

“This conversation is getting very boring.” Buri rolled her eyes, and, to Thayet’s relief, the king seemed entertained rather than offended by Buri’s casual insolence. “People in love are always boring.” 

“That’s the third time I’ve heard a variation of that remark today, Buri,” commented Thayet, torn between amusement and irritation. “You know who is really boring? People who repeat the same complaints every day.” 

“Ouch.” Buri whistled and kicked her horse forward, calling as she parted from them, “I can tell when I’m not wanted. I’ll leave you two lovebirds to chip at each other in peace, or whatever boring things people in love do.” 

Thayet, abruptly too embarrassed to look at the king, stared after Buri as she joined a group of nobles that included Raoul of Goldenlake, one of the few Tortallans that Buri had developed respect and liking for, but she had to return her attention to the man beside her when he complimented her. “Your Highness, that green is stunning on you. It brings out your eyes in a most spectacular fashion.” 

“Does it?” Coyly Thayet widened her eyes because the king was the last person in Tortall that she would have told about the hour that she had wasted searching for the dress that perfectly emphasized her eyes. “I hadn’t noticed, Your Majesty, but I had noticed that your robes match your eyes perfectly.” 

That wasn’t too surprising, for the king, as he so often did, was wearing a rich blue that brought out the same shades in his gaze. The king knew what color suited him and was apparently determined to take advantage of it. 

“Thank you.” The king inclined his head to her. “You really don’t have to call me ‘Your Majesty’ except at state occasions. I’d much prefer if you just said the far less fussy ‘Jon.’” 

“Very well, Jon.” Her mouth curved into a smile that was just for him as she tried to remind herself that he was only Jon to her. “Then you must call me ‘Thayet.’” 

“You honor me, Thayet.” Jon brought her hand to his lips for a kiss before Thayet could think to pull away—because even if he had done no more than kiss her fingers, they were still moving at too much of a breakneck pace for Thayet in this courtship she wasn’t sure was a courtship and romance was the last thing she had been looking for as a refuge. Romance, especially for royalty, meant marriage, and marriage had caged her mother until she had jumped off that tower in the bravest deed she had ever done.


	3. The Proposal

The Proposal 

“Do I have green in my teeth?” Thayet slid her tongue along her teeth, feeling for trapped fennel or leek from the salad being served at Jon’s picnic, because she couldn’t imagine any other reason that the nobles scattered across the blankets spread under the purple pavilions rippling in the breeze blowing off the Olorun on a verdant hill overlooking Corus would have for constantly craning their necks to study her speculatively. Surely they had gotten used to her presence enough to not stare at her as if she had sprouted three heads. 

“No.” Buri gave a secret smile as she chased a leaf of lettuce around her bowl. “Don’t worry. They are just evaluating their future queen, because all of them must have heard the rumors about the king commissioning from the finest craftsman in Corus what can only be an engagement ring.” 

“They shouldn’t listen to gossip.” Thayet’s tone was tart as the vinegar dressing drizzled over her salad. “Even if such gossip were true, I don’t see how it could possibly relate to me.” 

“Don’t tell me that the old K’miri canard about love being blind is true after all. ” Buri stabbed the lettuce triumphantly when she finally caught it. “Please tell me that you can see that if the gossip were true, the king would have ordered the ring for you, Thayet.” 

“I’ll tell you that after you explain why you’ve suddenly decided to trust court gossip farther than you can throw it one-armed in the midst of a blizzard,” retorted Thayet, massaging her temples because the dreadful combination of court life and Buri were enough to give any mortal a headache. 

“This gossip came to me on good authority.” Buri’s dark eyes were so serious that Thayet lost her appetite and placed her salad aside. “I heard it from Sir Raoul, a close friend of the king and maybe a friend to us as well.” 

“If he’s a friend to the king, he should keep the king’s secrets.” Thayet spoke more sharply than she had intended but after growing up amongst backstabbing warlords she knew that secrets betrayed could kill. Her father would have slit the throat of any man who broke faith with him, but she had seen already that Jon was not disposed to hear treason in every whisper. 

“He probably wanted to give you warning through me of what the king was planning so you could prepare a a response that wouldn’t embarrass the king.” Buri bristled, and Thayet saw that one Tortallan knight had gained Buri’s loyalty. “He was doing you and his king a favor. You could be grateful instead of suspicious and haughty.”

“I’m too confused to be grateful,” admitted Thayet, blinking away tears that she blamed on the wind streaming off the river, because a princess of Sarain did not cry upon hearing rumors of a king proposing to her. A princess of Sarain did her duty, standing as tall and as hard as a stone fortress, but Thayet wasn’t truly a princess of Sarain. She was an exile who had fled from her motherland and fatherland instead of standing as a stone fortress, and Thayet still didn’t know whether running from her home was an act of extreme bravery or cowardice. Desperation and instinct—the flight drive when fight was impossible—had banished her from Sarain, and if she agreed to marry Jon, she was afraid that her motivations would be the same. That thought terrified her more than anything she had encountered in Sarain. She couldn’t rush into a marriage for sanctuary when the only escape from marriage was death like her mother had found after leaping from her tower. Marriage promised her destruction as much as it did salvation. “This is all happening too fast, Buri. I’m not ready to marry yet, and I can’t promise that I ever will be, so what can I tell Jon?” 

“The truth.” Buri clasped Thayet’s wrists. “If he can’t accept that, then he’s made it very obvious that he’s not the man for you.” 

“If I tell him the truth, he might kick me out of his country.” Thayet swallowed a frog that had leapt into her throat. 

“Then we’ll go somewhere else.” Buri’s chin lifted. “We appreciate the welcome he has given us, but we aren’t dependent on his generosity. We are warrior women of the K’mir, born to be nomads.” 

Noticing Jon wending his way through the blankets to the one she was sharing with Buri, Thayet smoothed her skirts more from the need to occupy her trembling hands than from a fear that they were rumpled. Not that it made a difference if Jon saw her dress in disarray since she wasn’t in love with him no matter what impertinent Bur might claim on the contrary. 

Apparently observing Jon’s progress as well, Buri rose and strode off to join Gareth the Younger (who was always telling Thayet to refer to him as Gary), Gary’s new wife Cythera, and Raoul of Goldenlake (probably the main attraction from Buri’s perspective), the three of whom were picnicking under a nearby pavilion. 

“I see Buri has decided that she doesn’t need to chaperone you when I’m around.” Jon had slipped onto Thayet’s blanket without so much as a rustle to alert her, and Thayet internally cursed herself for getting distracted when the upcoming conversation would doubtlessly require all her wits about her. “I’m flattered.” 

“She’s not my chaperone,” corrected Thayet reflexively because Buri would be irate at being described in a manner befitting an overbearing nurse rather than a warrior woman. “She’s my friend and protector.” 

“And nobody could do a better job, to be sure.” Jon uncorked a bottle of wine, filled two crystal goblets, and extended one by the stem toward Thayet. “Wine?” 

To have something solid to cling to when she felt so adrift, Thayet accepted the chalice with a gracious nod. 

“To your radiant beauty, Thayet.” Jon raised his goblet in her honor. 

“To your kind hospitality, Jon.” Thayet returned the toast, and they both sipped. 

Tasting the sweet white wine—an elegant vintage Thayet could identify as Tyran—Thayet wondered if both of them were trying to draw courage from the alcohol, and if that already doomed their relationship to be as miserable as her parents’. 

“I would like to talk to you.” Jon fiddled with the stem of his goblet, and Thayet saw that he truly was as nervous as her. They had never hurt one another, but she felt that they could destroy each other without even meaning to do it, the way a person might trample a bug and never even be aware of the tiny life stamped out. The knowledge that she had some power of him should have been a comfort but instead it made her stomach sick. She didn’t want to cause Jon pain, and she certainly never wanted to be harmed by him. They weren’t even in a true romance yet, and it was already aching. “I’ve been thinking about your future. You know that you are welcome to live here in Tortall.” 

“Thank you.” Thayet inclined her heard in acknowledgement, and then went on, “I would like to establish a school in your kingdom, as I’ve explained before.” 

“You could do that and more if you were my queen.” Jon’s eyes were riveted on her as if to drink in every flicker of her expression. 

“I’m utterly unfit to be your queen.” Thayet couldn’t believe that she had to explain such political realities to a king. “I’m a—-“ 

“Princess,” Jon interrupted. “Even the greatest devotees of etiquette have to admit that a princess is absolutely a suitable wife for a king.” 

“Not a princess from a war-torn country,” Thayet reminded him although she shouldn’t have been put in the awkward position of doing so. “My title is tenuous at best. As soon as the other warlords overthrow and kill my father, and that’s a matter of when rather than if, my title will be worthless or worse a liability. I have no treater to offer you as a dowry, and you’ll need gold aplenty to start your reign. I have nothing to give you in marriage but myself, Jon.” 

“You say that as if you’re nothing, but you’re all I want in a marriage, Thayet.” Jon was so fervent that this declaration might have been enough for her to agree to be married if she hadn’t grown up a daughter of a marriage that had begun as a love story—the fierce warlord who fell for the beautiful daughter of a K’miri chieftain—that was supposed to bring peace to a realm and had become a bitter nightmare that divided the country even more sharply. She understood that courtly romances were all pretty lies about love meant to put a veneer over a lust that could turn violently possessive or spiteful. “Your title allows me to marry you, but I don’t want to marry you for a title or for gold. I want to marry you because you are everything a queen should be: clever, courageous, strong, poised, willing to challenge tradition, embracing new ideas, and passionately committed to the people of this realm even when they weren’t, strictly speaking, your people. You were born to rule.” 

“Not in Sarain.” Thayet would never forget the unceasing prayers her father had ordered for the birth of a son that always told Thayet she was not fit to rule because she did not happen to possess the right private parts. 

“Not in Sarain,” agreed Jon quietly, “but in Tortall.” 

Before Thayet could reply to this soft but compelling assertion, Jon withdrew a velvet box concealed within his voluminous robes and opened it to reveal a golden ring embedded with emeralds that glistened in the sunlight. The jewelry dazzled Thayet so much that she almost missed Jon’s earnest proposal. “Marry me, Thayet jian Wilimia. Be my queen and rule beside me.” 

Jon was promising her so much power—power to change Tortall for the better for as many of its inhabitants as possible—that seemed tantalizingly close if she stretched out to take the ring and accept the proposal he was offering her, but she was afraid that if she tried to touch it that it would fade like a mirage, like the mist in the mountains of Sarain. 

“It’s too soon for me to think about marrying you, Jon.” Thayet hated herself for sounding weak when she needed to be strong. 

“Of course you think I’m rushing you into marriage.” Jon tore at his coal black hair. “That’s not what I’m trying to do, I swear by all the gods. You can take all the time you need to consider my proposal and come back with an answer—that is, if you aren’t refusing already…” 

Thayet realized that she wasn’t (though part of her was worried that she should be and she was just setting them both up for misery) even as she assured him, almost tripping over her words, “I’m not refusing. I just need some time and space to reflect, but I will get back to you as soon as I know, I promise.” 

After all, she understood that for Jon finding a queen, whether it was her or not, would be of paramount importance. Although she didn’t love Jon, not now and maybe not ever, she did respect him enough not to want to delay his search for a bride any longer than she had to. 

“Good.” Jon cleared his throat. “No matter what you decide, please be assured that you will always be welcome in Tortall. I’m not trying to force you into marriage or anything so unchivalrous as that.” 

“I know.” Thayet gave him a slight, sad smile and thought that was the least she could offer him after he had been willing to share everything he had with her. “If I thought you were, I would’ve run away already.” 

“Very wise.” Jon seized on her smile to offer his own small one. “Please accept the ring anyway, as a token of my esteem, Thayet.” 

Since she was about to ask him to trust her, she decided that she had to demonstrate her faith in him. Sliding the ring onto her finger (but not the one that would have indicated engagement), Thayet said with all the confidence she would muster, “I would request your leave to ride south to visit with Alanna in the desert.” 

Traveling would remove the clouds from her mind and heart as well as confirm with Alanna that the romance between Alanna and Jon was over, because Thayet had no intention of stealing Jon from her friend. 

“The romance between Alanna and me is dead,” Jon insisted, “but if speaking with Alanna will set your heart at ease, may the gods grant you speed and safety on your journey.” 

"I don't want to come between you and Alanna." Thayet spoke the only truth she felt comfortable sharing.

“You needn’t be concerned on that count.” Jon’s tone was wry and his expression droll. “I promise you that Alanna and me are quite good enough at coming between ourselves.”


	4. The Mystery

The Mystery

“Thayet had a ring on her hand as we rode back from our picnic.” Cythera’s baby blue eyes that obviously missed nothing at court were fixated on Jon, who was already regretting his decision to join Gary and his wife for tea and scones that evening. If there were any couple in the realm adept at dissecting the minutia of his thoughts and behaviors, it was Gary and Cythera. They meant well but they could bring on a migraine faster than someone malicious in Jon’s experience. A night of solitude would have been better for his mind and soul but he was quickly learning that kings weren’t allowed much time to themselves. “But it wasn’t on the right finger to be an engagement ring.” 

“I thought you were going to propose to her.” Gary seemed more interested in waving his scone around so that crumbs fell to the carpet than with eating it. “Don’t tell me that you got tongue-tied because then I won’t know whether to laugh at you or yell at you.” 

“I did propose to her.” Jon bit into a scone and found that it tasted too dry and he couldn’t swallow. “It’s just she didn’t accept or not accept if you take my meaning.” 

“No, I don’t.” Gary’s brown eyes crackled with impatience at Jon’s imprecision. “That’s about as clear as mud. Try acting like you were taught basic grammar and remove some of the negatives please.” 

“Thayet reduces me to senselessness.” Jon, appetite gone, dropped his scone on his tiny porcelain platter. “She didn’t accept my proposal, but she didn’t refuse it either.” 

“So where does that leave us?” Gary arched an eyebrow. 

Jon, about to point out that was a question for Thayet, was spade the necessity of an immediate response when a maid slipped into the parlor to place a tray of poached pears on the table between the sofas where Jon, Gary, and Cythera were seated. Cythera, who apparently was craving poached pears in her pregnancy, exclaimed in delight and seized one with tremendous excitement as if she hadn’t eaten in a month. 

“I don’t know,” confessed Jon, crimson-cheeked, once the distraction of the poached pears had abated. 

“I’m afraid that I can’t help too much with that.” Gary shrugged. “Women are a mystery to me.” 

“Probably because you insist on regarding us a monolith, love.” Cythera nudged Gary in the ribcage with an elbow. “It’s not as if women have one collective brain that compels them to act the same way. Women are all unique.” 

Sensing that this might be important to penetrating the breathing, beautiful enigma that was Thayet, Jon urged, “Go on, my lady. I’m all ears.” 

“Women have different tastes. We don’t all like the same things, sire.” Cythera emphasized her point with a wag of her fork. “Take poached pears, for instance. Some women love them, some women hate them, and some women are indifferent to them.” 

“You want to pretend that men are clueless about matters of the heart, and you just compared romance and love to poached pears.” Gary chuckled. “I appreciate the irony even if you don’t.” 

“Why shouldn’t I use poached pears to explain myself?” Cythera flared. “Poached pears are a delicious and relevant example.” 

“Only to you because you’re craving them.” Gary slid an arm around Cythera’s still-narrow waist and drew her close to his chest, brushing his lips across her forehead. Watching their easy intimacy, Jon longed to have that sort of relationship with Thayet, a prospect that seemed dauntingly out of reach but not impossible. Maybe that was the worst thing about his drive to be with Thayet. If she was truly unattainable, perhaps he would have been able to move on and settle for another bride, but, as it was, he was hopelessly devoted to dream of convincing Thayet to be his wife and queen. “Please say that you won’t be obsessed with them for the next nine months, my dear.” 

“Don’t worry.” Cythera kissed Gary’s cheek. “I’ll move onto another craving by next week, I’m sure.” Tearing her focus away from Gary, she turned to Jon. “What exactly did Thayet say, Jon?” 

“That she needed time and space to think about my offer.” Jon massaged his temples, hoping Cythera could translate the language of women to him. “That she wanted to ride south to speak with Alanna.” 

“Well, that’s a bad sign,” observed Gary dryly. “Now Alanna will give Thayet all the dirty details on you, Jon, and she’ll never accept your proposal.” 

“Hogwash.” Cythera shook her head. “If Thayet wasn’t considering marrying Jon, she would’ve just said no.” 

“I told her to take all the time and space she needs, to have a safe journey, and that she shouldn’t feel forced to marry me because she’ll always be welcome in Tortall.” Jon tugged at his black beard. “Gods, I hope I didn’t sound desperate and groveling. Thayet makes me lose my dignity way too often.” 

“Your reply was perfect,” Cythera assured him even as Gary snorted, suggesting he wasn’t a loyal friend after all if he was finding so much humor in Jon’s bewilderment. “It was very gallant and not creepily possessive or tyrannical.” 

“You should assign a squad of the King’s Own to her.” Gary, smoothing his features into a semblance of seriousness, made his first constructive contribution to the conversation. “You’ll know that she’s protected during her travels, and she’ll think you’re the height of chivalry.” 

“What if that comes across as—to borrow Cythera’s phrasing—creepily possessive or tyrannical?” Jon’s forehead furrowed. 

“It won’t unless you imply that they are there to run their swords through her heart if she so much as thinks about refusing your proposal.” Cythera picked up a second poached pear and began consuming it with gusto. 

“Exactly,” agreed Gary. “Just explain to Thayet that it is a courtesy you’d extend to any visiting royalty—ensuring their security while they journey through your realm. It doesn’t have to be a romantic gesture unless she wants it to be, which makes it genius, as my ideas normally are, of course.” 

“That’s the humility you’re renowned for, cousin.” Jon laughed, pleased to have some direction in how to proceed next with Thayet. 

“Humility is overrated.” Gary snickered. “My brilliance, however, isn’t.”


	5. The Honor Guard

The Honor Guard 

“Your Highness, we are under strict orders to guard you in your travels.” As he approached the stables, Jon could hear the politely incessant tone of Sergeant Conan haMinch, a third son of that massive clan whom Raoul said seemed to joined the Own out of a genuine desire to serve the realm rather than to laze about and charm court ladies in his uniform. 

“On whose authority were these commands given, Sergeant?” Thayet’s hands were on her hips and her manner so imperious that Jon, wincing, realized that he should have obtained Thayet’s consent to the honor guard before it had materialized as she readied for her departure, but he had been so worried that she might refuse this overture that he hadn’t been able to humble himself enough to ask. Curse his pride for making him a fool again. 

“That would be mine.” Jon tried to infuse his voice with a calm confidence he currently didn’t feel. 

“May I have a private word with you, Your Majesty?” Thayet’s lips were blades, and her cutting annunciation of his title made it more an angry address than a respectful one. 

“Of course.” Jon knew his attempt at a dignified nod was undermined by the flames burning like blaze balm up his neck and into his cheeks. 

Once she and Jon had rounded a corner of the stable and were out of earshot of Buri and King’s Own squad, Thayet said in a tone that rendered it more of a demand than a request, “Please explain why you have assigned a squad to me.” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” Jon was too frustrated to be tactful. “I want to protect you.” 

“I’m sorry you think it’s obvious that I need your protection—“ Thayet stiffened so that she became more statue than woman, and Jon longed to reach out a soothing hand, but the space between them suddenly was a gulf instead of inches—“but I assure Your Majesty that Buri and I can manage just fine without your protection.” 

Her cold use of his title felt like such a slap across the face that he took refuge in formality. Squaring his shoulders in what he hoped was a kingly posture, he replied crisply, “I assure Your Highness that my offer of protection is one I would extend to any foreign royalty visiting my realm, so Your Highness taking offense is most unfounded.” 

“Your lips are moving and all I hear is Gareth the Younger’s words.” Thayet lifted an eyebrow. 

“You aren’t satisfied with a political or personal explanation.” Jon’s jaw clenched so tightly it hurt. “What am I supposed to say?” 

“The truth.” Thayet stared into his eyes as if she could see the truth without him having to speak it and as if she had known it before he did. “I don’t need you to tell me what you think I want to hear. I just need the truth from you.” 

“The truth is that I want to protect you.” Jon was hot with impatience that she hadn’t grasped the first and most important thing he had said to her. “I already told you that. You were just too miffed to listen.” 

“I’ve already explained that Buri and I can defend ourselves,” hissed Thayet. “We don’t need your protection.” 

“I know that you don’t need it.” Weary of arguing in circles, Jon closed his eyes and prayed for wisdom in dealing with women. “I’m offering it anyway.” 

“I can’t accept. Don’t you see, Jon, that I’ve already taken more from you than I can ever repay?” Thayet’s hands were shaking but not, Jon recognized with a start, from fury. 

Wrapping his fingers around hers so that she could feel even if she couldn’t hear that loving her was all he was trying—however clumsily—to do, he murmured, “Can’t you see that I don’t want to be repaid? Can’t you understand that I just want to do something nice for you not because I think you’re a flinching flower who will wilt without my protection but just because I care about you, Thayet?” 

Thayet paused for a moment that lasted an eternity to Jon, and then she answered, soft as lamb’s wool, “Then I accept your generous offer with humility and gratitude.” 

Thankful that Thayet had relented and they weren’t parting in wrath, Jon bowed to kiss her fingertips, lingering in the courtly pose since it gave him an excuse to feel her warm flesh against his and to hold her before she disappeared on her journey. This would be the last time he saw her for awhile so he committed everything about her—how her hair shone in its black braid, how her riding clothes hugged her figure in a way Jon could only dream of doing, and how smooth her skin felt under his mouth—to his memory. He drank her in but knew he would still be thirsty for her until she returned to him with a response to the most important question he had ever asked in his life. “May the gods grant you speed and on your travels, Thayet. I will be anxiously awaiting your return.” 

“I should hope so.” Thayet’s voice was arch but her eyes were laughing as she slid her hands away from Jon’s clutches. “You did propose to me, don’t forget.” 

“I could never forget anything about you,” Jon assured her and was rewarded with the sight of her smile for the first time that morning before she marched off to order Buri and the squad on the long trip south.


	6. The King's Mercy

The King’s Mercy

“This land was Tortall’s breadbasket.” Ian Fuller, the son of a wealthy merchant and one of Thayet’s honor guard, waved a hand to encompass the fields of withered grain and dry earth around them as they rode down a road toward what Ian promised was a marketplace where they could replenish their bread. 

“Now Tortall’s breadbasket is barren.” Drew Neilson, another member of the King’s Own, observed in a tone that might have been teasing it it weren’t for the shadows in his eyes as they neared a town of stone houses and stores. “Are you sure your marketplace won’t be empty, Ian?” 

“My father owns the charter for this marketplace.” Ian did look discomfited by the beggars in the gutters, extending clay bowls for coins or food to every passerby, and the barefoot children racing between the stalls with ribcages sticking out from their ragged clothes. Thayet’s stomach pinched as she imagined their hunger. “I’d know if the market was empty.” 

The market wasn’t empty, but as Thayet steered her horse past the stalls, she didn’t see many enticing things to buy. The vegetables were wilted, the fruit stunted, the meat sinewy, and the grain withered as it was in the fields. 

“This is Adara Baxter, the baker’s wife.” Ian dismounted by a stall selling bread and pastries, which were the first mouth-watering goods Thayet had glimpsed in the market. Giving Adara a quick peck on a wrinkled cheek, Ian said, “We’ll take five of your long loaves.” 

As Adara ordered a lanky apprentice lad to put together Ian’s order and Ian paid her for the bread, he asked, “How has business been around here, Adara?” 

“As bad as I can remember.” Adara smeared flour from her palms onto her checkered apron, and Thayet wasn’t surprised—though she was saddened—to hear this. “Many tenants are already afraid of being evicted if they fail to pay their rents should the harvest be as poor as it promises to be, and animals are being sold at pitiful rates or slaughtered because their owners can’t afford to feed them. Times are hard, Ian, but things will get worse before they get better, mark my words. Be careful out there. People are angry as only hunger can make them. A mob of them stormed the miller’s last week, trying to smash his skull in because they believed he was cheating with his scales to rob them of their wheat. They’re being held for hanging now, but who can say there aren’t more of those sort to take their place?” 

“If they are, we’ll deal with them,” Ian vowed, gripping the hilt of his sword. 

“No doubt.” Adara’s eyes slid over to rest keenly on Thayet and Buri. “I thought members of the Own weren’t allowed ladies.” 

“They aren’t my ladies.” Ian flushed to the roots of his copper-gold hair. “I’m just their escort, Adara.” 

“Only important folks get escorts,” commented Adara, staring even more attentively at Thayet and Buri as if to memorize their features. 

“May I introduce Her Highness Thayet jian Wilimia and her loyal companion Buri?” Ian gave Thayet’s identity away before she could shoot him a look telling him to keep it a secret, and Thayet swallowed a curse. 

“Welcome to my humble stall, Your Highness.” Adara curtsied and held out a crescent-shaped pastry sprinkled with almonds to Thayet. “Please sample one of my almond moons. They are my speciality.” 

Unable to refuse without drawing even more attention to her identity, Thayet ate the pastry, which fluffed in her mouth and tasted sweet yet tart on her tongue. She complimented Adara on the almond moon, tossed the lady a coin, and nudged her mount away from the throngs in the marketplace as swiftly as she could, Buri and the King’s Own squad clopping along behind her. 

“Ian.” Sergeant Conan haMinch gave the addressed member of the squad a thunderous glower as they left the jostling market in their wake. “Now we know why your village misses you when you’re gone on duty. Without you, they’re bereft of their village idiot.” 

“What do you mean, Sergeant?” Ian looked so bemused that his superior officer’s aspersions against his intelligence seemed only more merited. 

“I mean you announced Princess Thayet’s identity to an entire marketplace in a town we were just told harbors violent discontent,” snapped Sergeant Conan as they spurred their steeds out of the town’s iron gates and back onto a road that sliced through one blighted field after the next in a famine that stretched as far as the eye could see. 

“The town doesn’t harbor violent discontent, Sergeant,” sputtered Ian, obviously interpreting his officer’s words more as an insult to his home than an honest assessment of reality. 

“You truly are an idiot.” That was Drew. “We were just told by one of your old friends that a mad mob tried to murder the miller.” 

“Any village can get a mob during a famine.” Ian bristled, and Thayet could hear leaves cracking as they rode through a shady, wooded area between two barren fields. “It’s not like the place is infested with bandits.” 

“Shut up,” snarled Buri, glaring at the trees more than Ian. “Speak of bandits, and they’ll appear.” 

As if on cue, a battle cry echoed from the trees, and a surge of bandits armed mainly with axes for woodcutting and pitchforks better suited for spearing straw than people swarmed around them. 

“We don’t want to hurt a pretty lady.” The bandit who seemed to be in charge gazed at Thayet with hollow eyes in an emaciated, weatherbeaten face. “Just give us your money, and we won’t give you any scars, beautiful.” 

“That’s not how you speak to your betters,” roared Sergeant Conan, whacking the flat of his sword across the bandit’s nose. Thayet could hear the cartilage shatter, and then blood pooled on his lip as it flowed from his nose. “Lower your weapons and disperse or be declared outlaws outside the king’s mercy.” 

“The king’s got no mercy,” someone at the rear of the mob yelled, “or he wouldn’t let us starve.” 

After that, pandemonium ensued as the bandits tried to attack with their axes and pitchforks but were rebuffed with the swords of the Own and the arrows fired from Buri’s and Thayet’s bows. When the skirmish ended not long after it had begun, Thayet saw three corpses with her arrows piercing their chests. 

Sergeant Conan and his squad corralled the surviving bandits around the trunk of an expansive elm. “By becoming bandits, you outlawed yourselves,” pronounced the sergeant as Drew, darting up the tree, slung a rope with a noose knotted at the bottom around a broad branch. “Outlaws may be executed at any time since the king has declared a state of martial law to prevent such outbreaks of banditry during the famine.” 

“Please.” A woman in a tattered dress wailed, her veins popping in hysteria. “I was just trying to feed my children. They haven’t got a father since the Sweating Sickness carried him off. Don’t leave them orphaned.” 

“Should’ve thought of your children before you turned outlaw.” Sergeant Conan was implacable, and Thayet didn’t know if she was witnessing justice or cruelty. 

“Mercy,” begged the woman as Sergeant Conan nodded at his men to drag her toward the noose. 

“You’d do better appealing to the gods than to me.” Sergeant Conan’s manner was as cold as a grave, while the noose tightened around the woman’s thin neck. 

Thayet covered her ears—not caring if she appeared faint of heart—so that she wouldn’t have to hear the woman’s neck snap—and closed her eyes so that this wouldn’t become a macabre moment she revisited in nightmares. Living through it once was more than enough. 

She remained in that pose as all the executions were carried out, but as they rode off, leaving a tree heavy with corpses to discourage future bandits, she couldn’t help but see even as she tried to look away from the feet swaying in the a breeze. 

“This leaves us in a conundrum.” Buri’s tone suggested that she was speaking more to distract Thayet than because she had anything insightful to say. 

“Is it the question of whether hanging outlaws is justice or brutality?” Thayet tugged at her ponytail, uncertain if she should be mourning or rejoicing in the deaths of the bandits. 

“Going to go with a hard no on that.” Buri clapped Thayet on the shoulder. “They would’ve killed us, so all is fair in love and war as the old K’miri saying goes. Oh, and speaking of love, Jon is to blame for this conundrum again.” 

“I very much doubt that.” Thayet shot Buri a skeptical glance since a bandit attack was one of the few things that could distract her from her Jon conundrum—her question of whether she should accept or decline Jon’s proposal. 

“Come on.” Buri stuck her boots out of her stirrups to kick Thayet’s ankles. “Don’t you see that he sent this squad with us, and this squad helped us escape the bandits, but it was the loose tongue of a certain numbskull member of this squad that brought the outlaws down upon us, so should we be grateful or resentful?” 

“Perhaps both.” Thayet attempted a grin that probably was closer to a grimace. “You can be resentful, and I’ll be grateful.” 

“Excellent.” Buri snickered. “Gratitude only makes you more beautiful, and resentment is my favorite emotion. It gives me an excuse—not that I need one, of course—to be disagreeable.” 

Thayet might have laughed if she didn’t have an important question she had been meaning to ask Buri for days burning on her lips. “Buri, what do you really think of Jonathan?” 

“Why does it matter what I think of him?” Buri clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You’re the one who might be marrying him, not me.” 

“Your opinion of him will help me decide whether I should marry him.” Thayet fiddled with her reigns, and her mount, sensing her unease, whinnied anxiously. Patting her horse soothingly, she added fiercely, “You’re my best friend, Buri, and you know me better than anyone, so if you tell me I shouldn’t marry Jon, I won’t.” 

“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” scoffed Buri. “I’m your friend, not your nursemaid.” 

“Then at least tell me what you think of Jon.” Thayet reached out to clasp Buri’s wrists. “I need to know in order to make my decision because maybe if my mother had listened to her K’miri friends, she wouldn’t have ended up stuck in a marriage to my father.” 

“Jon is not your father, thank the Horse Lords.” Buri’s assurance made Thayet’s grip relax. “He doesn’t have a heart of granite, especially when it comes to you, and he respects women and people in general more than your father ever did.” 

“My father didn’t always have a heart of granite toward my mother,” murmured Thayet, since, as impossible as it was to believe, her parents had once loved one another. They had been a love match before her father became spiteful about Kalasin’s inability to bear a male child and warrior heritage. “They loved each other once, that that wasn’t enough to prevent their marriage from ruin.” 

“You won’t just be marrying for love,” pointed out Buri. “You’ll be marrying for political reasons as well. I hate politics but even I can see that.” 

“There were political reasons for my parents to marry as well.” Thayet sighed. “As naive as it sounds, they hoped their marriage could unite a country torn apart by civil war between the highlanders and the lowlanders, but we know that turned out to be a broken dream right from the start, bless their tortured, tangled hearts.” 

“All I can say is that I think Jon is a better man than your father ever was even if I do prefer his friend Raoul as he is much less serious and boring. Jon cares about his people and is as committed to doing his duty as you are, Thayet.” Buri shrugged. “He seems to be falling in love with you, and I believe that he could make you happy perhaps not all the time but at least most of the time. That’s likely the best you can hope for from a marriage, especially a royal one.” 

“When we fled Sarain, I just thought I was escaping a royal marriage as well.” Thayet bit her lip, because she couldn’t shake the feeling that all her dreams and all her plans would change in a way that somehow lessened her if she agreed to become Jon’s wife, since it seemed as if a woman always lost something of herself in a marriage. Maybe when she fled Sarain, she had been abandoning the crushing weight of her responsibilities, and now she felt her obligations constricting her again. 

As if she could sense what was clouding Thayet’s mind, Buri said, sounding almost subdued, “You could make a difference beyond all your wildest dreams if you were Jon’s queen. You’d have that power.” 

“Would I?” Thayet arched an eyebrow. “Or would he? Would I only have power through him?” 

“You would.” Buri grinned crookedly. “You just have to fight for that power, but remember you’re a warrior woman of the K’mir and so more than equal to the task.”


	7. The Whisperer

The Whisperer

The sky was as orange as the desert sand as the red sun set, and Thayet smiled as she felt a breeze blow across the flat, arid landscape, which contrasted pleasantly with the warmth still seeping from the sand that had baked in the sunlight all day, though Thayet knew from experience that soon the heat would disappear from the sand because there were no plants to trap it. She would treasure the warmth—and the rare sense of peace that had descended upon her—while it lasted. 

Though she had come to the desert with the intention of finding Alanna and gaining clarity in how best to proceed in her relationship with Jon, she hadn’t expected to discover such serenity and joy in an environment she had heard was harsh and a people she had been told were as hard as their land and skeptical of every outsider who dared to trespass upon their territory. Instead, she found the desert with its beaming sun, glittering golden sands, and the piercing blue of its oases and sky breathtakingly beautiful. As for the people, she had felt instantly at home among them. They reminded her of the K’mir with their love of horses, fierce desire to be free, and passion for the difficult but spectacular landscapes in which they lived as nomads. Like the K’mir, she thought the Bazhir had been hated, oppressed, and misrepresented by those who had never bothered to understand them. 

Yet, and this was what had surprised Thayet most about the Bazhir, she saw hope in the eyes of almost every one of them from Persopolis (where she and her escorts had stopped for a night to receive directions on where they might locate the Bloody Hawk tribe) to the young and old of the Bloody Hawk had hope shining in their black eyes. Hope that came from Jonathan, Thayet knew. The Bazhir had faith in their Voice while the northerners still had yet to trust their king. The Bazhir believed that Jonathan would bring peace and prosperity, while the northerners worried about their harvest. 

It was the confidence that the Bazhir showed in their Voice that assured Thayet that Jon was truly not her father, because Adigun had never treated the K’mir with anything but scorn even during the summertime of his romance with Kalasin, but Jon cared about the Bazhir simply because they were people he was expected to lead, and he was determined to do that to the best of his abilities. That encouraged her to imagine that she and Jon could write a love story that didn’t end with a swan song like her mother’s, a triumph rather than a tragedy. 

“A copper for your thoughts?” Alanna, sitting on a woven mat beside Thayet, banged her shoulder into Thayet’s. “Why are you smiling like a court jester?” 

“I’m just thinking about the future Jon could create.” Thayet nodded her head, covered in a veil she had bought in Persopolis to honor their customs while she traveled among them, at a huddle of Bazhir children listening with wide-eyed wonder to the battle stories Ian and Drew from the King’s Own squad were sharing as they polished their armor beside the fire. Although she hadn’t been in Tortall long, it had been enough time to learn that the sight of northern soldiers entertaining an admiring flock of Bazhir children would have been a mirage before Jon became Voice. 

“A future in which you could be a part?” Alanna suggested with a knowing smirk. 

“Maybe.” Thayet was grateful that her veil concealed her blush from her keen friend. “How would you feel about that?” 

“You’ve asked me that a million times, and my answer hasn’t changed.” Alanna, impatient as ever, snorted. “I’d be happy for you and happy for Jon. Both of you are my friends, and I sincerely believe that you two could make one another happy.” 

“You and Jon really are done then?” pressed Thayet, alert for any flicker of a lie in Alanna’s violet eyes. 

“Done as last week’s rotten stew.” Alanna grinned crookedly at her own metaphor. “Whatever fire there was between Jon and me burned itself out long ago. I’m not even sad or bitter about how our relationship ended at this point. Jon is just my best friend and king now. Believe me, that’s more than enough for me.” 

“I don’t want you to think I’m stealing him.” Thayet bit her lip, since she had been taught since girlhood that robbing another lady of her man was the most treacherous crime a female could commit, and she imagined that rule was only more binding when the man in question was a crowned king. 

“I wish you would steal him.” Alanna’s eyes sparkled in the firelight as the stars began to dance in the darkening sky. “Ever since we met, I’ve been trying to play matchmaker for you and Jon.” 

“You have?” gasped Thayet, torn between an outraged sense of betrayal and an awed gratitude at the future her first Tortallan friend had plotted for her since their first uneasy acquaintance when Alanna and Buri had tried to kill each other.

“From the moment I saw you, I knew you’d be perfect for Jon.” Alanna’s smug expression reminded Thayet of a cat that had pounced on an unsuspecting rat. “You’re beautiful, you’re a princess, you’re poised, you’re politically astute in a way I could never be, and you’d be able to cut Jon down to size when his head gets too big. Everything Jon needs in a wife, you can offer. The only sticking point is whether Jon is perfect for you, and if he can provide everything you need.” 

“I know he isn’t perfect.” Thayet’s lips quirked but she was starting to think that even if Jon wasn’t perfect—she had seen flashes of his arrogance and his temper in moments such as the one by the stables before she left when she had resisted the honor guard he had assigned her without her consent—he was still the best husband she could have envisioned for herself. He was charming, dynamic, smart enough to embrace new ideas, daring enough to implement bold changes, and devoted to his duties and his people despite the stresses of ruling that weighed on him. Even when he was too enamored of his own importance or made a decision for somebody that he shouldn’t have, Thayet could still see the essential goodness behind these missteps. Jon wasn’t perfect but he wanted to be, and Thayet imagined that maybe one day she could come to love him for that. “With years as my husband, perhaps he could become perfect at least for me, though. There’s potential for perfection with him.” 

“You’ll marry him then?” Alanna squeezed Thayet’s fingers. 

“If he agrees to certain conditions.” Thayet had thought of a thousand ways to prevent Jon from driving her to suicide through powerlessness like her father had done to her mother if she became his queen and had ultimately settled on two terms that would remain secret out of respect for Jon until she could relate them to him. 

Alanna, who looked intrigued about the exact nature of these conditions, was interrupted before she could begin to ask about the terms of Thayet accepting Jon’s proposal by the headman Halef Seif suddenly coming to sit cross-legged on the mat across from Thayet and Alanna. 

“Forgive me if I speak too boldly—“ Halef bowed his head at Thayet to indicate that he was addressing her—“but the Bazhir only know how to speak honestly. I have heard that the Voice has invited you to share his tent.” 

Puzzled about what tent the Voice had invited her to share, Thayet’s forehead furrowed. She was about to request clarification when Alanna, giving Halef a glare as fiery as her hair, kicked the headman in the shins, hissing, “You were supposed to keep that a secret, Halef. Do I have to chop out your tongue to guarantee your silence next time?” 

Realizing with a shock that Halef must have been referring to Jon’s proposal, Thayet wrinkled her nose at Alanna. “Did you share my love life with the whole tribe, Alanna?” 

“The Woman Who Rides like a Man talks too much but not that much.” Halef chuckled as he rubbed the spots Alanna had kicked. “She only spoke to me about the Voice offering you a place in his tent.” 

“That’s a relief,” remarked Thayet wryly, directing the comment to Alanna more than to Halef. 

“I’m relieved that the Voice has asked one such as you to share his tent.” Halef’s tone was so serious that Thayet’s focus riveted on him as he gestured at the veil concealing her face. “You aren’t Bazhir, but you honor our customs. Never before has a northern queen worn a veil when traveling in our desert.” 

“I’m not a Bazhir, but already your people feel like mine, Halef Seif. The Bazhir remind me of my mother’s people, the K’mir.” Thayet struggled to articulate the sense of homecoming she had experienced in the presence of the Bazhir, who were as fierce and proud as the K’mir. “You love your children of the wind—“ she was proud of herself for recalling the phrase the Bazhir used to describe the horses that were their life and their delight—“as do the K’mir, you are strong warriors like the K’miri, and you make your home wherever you plant your tents as the K’miri do.” 

“You understand the Bazhir well.” Halef’s eyes were flooded with the hope that Thayet had thought only their Voice could spark in the Bazhir. “If you accepted the Voice’s invitation to share his tent, you would honor him. When I was a little boy who barely came up to my mother’s knee, she used to tell me that every great man had a woman sitting behind him in the shadows behind the circle around the fire, whispering wise advice in his ear. You could be that woman for the Voice. You could be the Woman Who Whispers to the Voice, and the Voice would listen to you as he would to no other.” 

Smiling as Halef’s words fanned flames in her cheeks because the Bazhir and Alanna’s blessing for her marriage was more than she had hoped to receive from her journey south, Thayet thought that she would be more than the woman who whispered to the Voice. She would not stay in the shadow cast by her husband, and she wouldn’t limit herself to providing counsel—she would lead as much as he did. That was her promise to herself and to all the Tortallans she would one day rule.


	8. The Conditions

The Conditions

As Jon made his way though the flower gardens after another interminable council meeting where he thought or maybe just hope that he had managed to convince some of the less generous nobles to lower the rents for the commoners in their fiefs to mitigate mass evictions, he tried to forget about the famine for just a few moments while he searched for the perfect flower to pick for Thayet, who had returned last evening and who had agreed to meet him for a stroll in the rose garden this afternoon. Finding the perfect flower for her would have been easy if she were a conventional court lady—favoring beautiful roses or pure lilies—but Thayet loved flowers that were as wild as her. 

Jon could still remember asking her on their first night walk through the gardens what her favorite flower was and how she had looked at him with the stars twinkling in her eyes and sparking in her hair as she responded with a smile, “Wildflowers, because wildflowers always survive, and wildflowers don’t care where they grow. They can grow as easily in a valley as they do in the highlands of Sarain.” 

Wildflowers, Jon thought now with a wry grin, might have no trouble growing in the highlands of Sarain, but it would have been easier to find the proverbial needle in a haystack than a wildflower in the well-manicured gardens of the Royal Palace, where any wildflower that dared to spread its petals would soon be removed by a swearing gardener. 

Jon finally spotted a purple wildflower freckled with yellow under a stone bench by a bubbling fountain. Bending to pluck the wildflower, Jon was conscious of how ridiculous he must look to anyone who glanced out a window to see him, an anointed king kneeling in the dirt to pick a wildflower, but he figured he could just add that the the ever-expanding list of ways that Thayet made him lose his mind. 

As he uprooted the flower, he inhaled its scent and thought that flowers always smelled sweeter when he picked them for Thayet. He rose and set off down a path that led toward the rose garden. His hand jittered as he held the flower he planned to give to Thayet, and, abruptly, he was reminded of the romance game Cythera claimed single court ladies played where they ripped the petals off a flower from a suitor, saying he loved her or he loved her not, and getting the answer to this riddle from the last petal. 

Suddenly, as he waited outside the trellis entwined with pink roses that marked the entrance to the rose garden for Thayet’s arrival, he was tempted to tear the petals off the wildflower he had just hunted, demanding an answer to the burning question of whether she loved him or loved him not…

Before he could do anything as mad with desire as that, he saw her approaching in a dress as green as the emeralds on the ring he had given her when he proposed. He prayed that he was wearing a charming, confident expression as she joined him. 

“Your Majesty.” She swept him a curtsy. “It’s good to see you again.” 

“Have you been gone so long that you forgot you’re supposed to call me Jon?” Jon bowed to kiss her fingers, the enticing aroma of the rosewater she had dabbed on her wrist wafting up his nostrils so he could practically taste it—taste her. “I’ve missed you, Thayet, and delight in your return from the desert.” 

“Is that flower for me or is it a sign of a new horticultural hobby, Jon?” Thayet’s eyes were keen as they rested on the flower still in Jon’s grasp and her tone was lightly teasing. 

Jon should have been vexed with himself for getting flustered by her mere presence again but he was so pleased that she had addressed him by his nickname rather than his title—which he dared to interpret as a portent that she might accept his proposal—that he laughed. “Of course it’s for you, fair lady.” Eager for the excuse to toucher her beautiful but untamable hair, he gestured at her head. “May I have the honor?” 

“Go on then.” She leaned toward him, and, as he tucked the flower behind her earlobe, he could smell that she had sprayed tantalizing rosewater there as well. His finger brushed against the tender shell of her ear for a second he would treasure for an eternity, and then he pulled away, the flower perched behind her ear. 

“You look breathtaking.” He smiled at her as he seized her arm and guided her through the trellis into the rose garden. 

As they passed white roses planted in diamonds around the pathway, she nodded her thanks and remarked, “I did enjoy my trip to the desert, Jon. Meeting the Bazhir was a pleasure, and the desert gave me a place to think about many things.” 

“Such as my proposal?” Jon hated to prod—he didn’t want her to feel that he was pressuring her—but he couldn’t stand the suspense, which had been terrible when she was traveling, but was even more agonizing when she was around. 

“Such as your proposal,” agreed Thayet, and Jon saw that she was fretting her hands, an uncharacteristically nervous behavior. He didn’t have time to ponder whether that was a lucky or unlucky omen before she said, “I believe you are a good man and you will be a good king. I’d be happy to be your wife upon two conditions, Jonathan of Conte.” 

“I should’ve known you’d drive a hard bargain,” Jon observed dryly, but because he would have found a spell to enchant the moon down from the sky if she wished it, he added, “Name the terms, and if they’re within my power and within reason, I’ll grant them.” 

“The Own is answerable to the king alone.” Thayet’s fingers tensed around his wrists as her arm lay over his. “If I were queen, I’d want to control a fighting force of my own, one under my authority, not yours.” 

“The famine has brought an unfortunate increase in banditry across the country.” Jon patted her arm to soothe her, wondering if she imagined he was going to try to forbid her from riding into battle like the warrior woman she was. “Raoul is overwhelmed sending squads out to handle the outlaws that are lurking behind every rock. Another fighting force led by you would be very much appreciated by him, and I say led by you because I believe you would like to take them into battle yourself.” 

“Yes, I would.” Thayet was gazing at him with such hope in her hazel eyes that his heart bloomed like the red roses blossoming in the bushes around them. “Not all the time, I promise, but when I can.” 

“A fighting force of your own is a brilliant idea, Thayet.” Jon saw the excitement grow in her eyes. “Of course you have my approval to build and lead it.” 

“Thank you.” Thayet was biting her lip in a way that would have been attractive if it didn’t make Jon anxious on her behalf. “That brings up my second condition, though, Jon. If I were queen, I wouldn’t want to have to get your seal of approval for everything. I’d expect to have power in my own right, not just through you. I’d need to be queen co-regent, not queen consort.” 

Jon flared up, ready to snap that there had never been a queen co-regent in Tortallan history and that Thayet could be queen consort as his mother of blessed memory and every queen before her had been content to be. Then he remembered with a surge of shame that he wanted to marry her because she had new ideas that could revitalize the realm and did not flinch from the daunting challenge of implementing them. She was brave, she was strong, and if she was going to be his queen, he had to trust her to wield his power. 

“If you accept my proposal,” he said at last, not knowing whether he was declaring or conceding, but grateful that he had thought before his temper had destroyed his chance to make Thayet his wife, “you’ll be queen co-regent, not queen consort.” 

“I’ll be queen co-regent that easily?” Thayet arched a dubious eyebrow. “You’re just going to wave your royal hand and make it so?” 

“I don’t promise it’ll be easy to get the council to agree to it, but I promise it’ll be done.” Jon’s lips quirked into a slight smirk. “Probably by Gary. He’s a genius at cajoling the council to do things they are reluctant to do. There is an old saying that behind every Conte is a Naxen to cleverly achieve our ambitious dreams, and he is my Naxen.” 

Jon had heard such aphorisms—that the Contes were the throne and the Naxens were the brains—since childhood, and he had always assumed that the Naxen behind his father was Uncle Gareth, Prime Minister and King’s Champion, but, after his mother died, and his father had cliffed himself, Jon had realized maybe it was his mother, sweet but with a hint of steel in her spine, that had been the Naxen behind his father’s reign. It was probably borderline incestuous for one family to depend on another so deeply but Gary was more brother than cousin to Jon. 

“I feel bad for Gary.” Thayet’s peal of laughter made Jon’s entire body tingle with the urge to kiss her. “Doing your dirty work.” 

“I’ll meet your conditions, Thayet.” Jon wanted her to say yes so he could kiss her on the lips instead of the fingers at long last. “Will you marry me?” 

“Yes.” Thayet slid the golden ring embedded with emeralds—that she much have been concealing in her palm the whole conversation—onto the finger that indicated engagement. Raising her hand for him to admire, she asked, “Isn’t it lovely?” 

“Only because it is worn by a gorgeous lady.” Jon brushed his mouth across hers, relishing how full and soft her lips felt beneath his. He hoped that he was kissing her with enough passion that she knew how attracted he was to her but not so fervently that she bolted from his ardor like a startled doe.

He pulled away from her even though he would have been happy to kiss her forever and stared into her face so that he could remember this moment and the elation that had a simple, shining source—she had said yes and part of him still couldn’t believe it—so he could describe it to his children and his grandchildren if he was so favored by the gods. 

“You aren’t my father, thank the Horse Lords.” Thayet’s voice was so low that Jon almost didn’t hear her. 

“Obviously not.” Jon could tell that he would have to be the romantic one in their relationship but for now he decided to tease her. “A father kissing his daughter like that would be extremely taboo in Tortall, my dear.” 

“That’s not what I meant. Get your mind out of the gutter.” Wrinkling her nose, Thayet nudged Jon in the stomach. “I meant that my father would never have let my mother have power or an army of her own.” 

“I’m not letting you have anything.” Jon curled a lock of her black hair around his finger, drinking in how it transformed the sunlight into itself. “You’re queen co-regent and don’t need my permission to do anything, remember?” 

“I do.” Thayet shot him a look of mingled humor and warning. “It’s you who will have to remember, or you’ll be in trouble with me, Jon.”


	9. The Vows

The Vows

Jonathan didn’t know how time had flown by so fast. It seemed as if one minute he had been discussing wedding decorations with Thayet and the next he was standing in a vestry of the Mithran temple in Corus with Gary and Raoul, his best men, brushing invisible lint off his purple robes and rearranging the silver crown over his black hair. 

All he knew was that soon he would be standing in front of a packed temple declaring his eternal love for Thayet before gods and mortals, and there was something he had been meaning to give her first—something he had been meaning to give her for weeks in fact. Unfortunately, capricious custom forbade him from seeing his future wife until they met in the nave. 

“I’m an idiot,” he muttered more to himself than to Gary and Raoul. 

“Yes, you are,” agreed Raoul rather too swiftly for Jon’s liking. 

“I’m your king.” Jon shot Raoul a glare sour as rancid milk. “It wouldn’t kill you to show me a bit of respect.” 

“By that you mean flattery.” Raoul laughed at Jon’s glower. “Only think how useless I would be as an advisor and friend—like a lifeboat with a hole in its bottom—if I said only what you wanted to hear instead of telling you the truth you needed to hear.” 

“Speaking of advising,” put in Gary, practical as ever, “what did you do wrong? I can’t fix your problem if I’m not aware of what you ruined.” 

“I didn’t ruin anything.” Jon bristled, irritated by Gary’s casual assumption that he had, which implied that he bumbled around causing crisis after crisis for his Prime Minister to resolve the way a nursemaid would have to tidy toys thrown around by a rambunctious toddler. “I just have a gift for Thayet.” 

“Wonderful. A gift is very thoughtful.” Raoul was now addressing Jon as if he were a skittish horse that might bolt at the slightest provokation. “You can give it to her after the wedding, though, to avoid bad luck, scandal, and a Master Oakbridge apoplexy at a flagrant breach in etiquette.” 

“No, I can’t.” Jon flapped his arms in agitation. “I want her to wear my gift when we’re married.” 

“How do you plan on getting the present to Thayet?” Gary arched an eyebrow. “Cythera is one of her bridesmaids, and I warn you pregnancy has transformed her from the sweet maiden I married into a frightful vixen, which Father says is a sign that she is carrying a boy. She won’t let you see Thayet without fighting tooth and nail.” 

“She will once she sees what I want to give Thayet.” Jon dug deeply into his voluminous robes to withdraw an ivory jewelry box, which he opened to reveal a pearl necklace that drew a gasp from Gary. 

“Aunt Lianne’s necklace.” Gary stared at the jewelry with a mixture of love, reverence, and heartbreak in his chestnut eyes. 

“She wore it on her wedding day.” Jon stroked a cool pearl with a thumb until it warmed beneath his touch. “It seems to have brought her love and joy in her marriage, so I hope it can do the same for Thayet and me.” 

“Aunt Lianne would want Thayet to wear it.” Gary’s voice was little more than a whisper. “She’d delight in seeing Thayet beautiful and you happy on your wedding day.” 

“Thank you for your understanding.” Jon clapped Gary on the shoulder because while Naxen disapproval wouldn’t have prevented him from giving the necklace to Thayet, it would have made the moment more bittersweet if his mother’s relatives were hurt by Jon sharing a family heirloom that was almost as much Naxen as Conte because their lines were so knotted together. 

“No need to thank me. It’s not my understanding you’ll need,” observed Gary, regaining his typical dry demeanor. “It’s my wife’s.” 

“I’m off to go use all my persuasive powers against her.” Jon strode toward the doorway. “Wish me luck, friends.” 

Before Gary or Raoul could respond to this request, Jon shut the door and hurried down the corridor to the room where Thayet and her bridesmaids were preparing for the marriage ceremony. Gathering his courage, he pounded on the door separating him from Thayet and was grateful to have done so when Cythera, bulging belly barricading him from the room, opened the door to snap at him as she shooed him away, “Begone, sire! If Thayet sees you, you’ll be doomed to a miserable marriage. I can’t believe that Gary let you come here. I’m going to kill him, I swear.” 

“As your king, I’m going to be conveniently deaf to your murder threats.” Jon attempted a winning grin and wondered how—when Alanna and Buri were Thayet’s other bridesmaids—it was Cythera who was his most daunting obstacle to reaching Thayet. Of course, he reminded himself wryly, it had been Cythera who had cajoled and bullied Buri into wearing a silver gown for the occasion. “Now may I see my bride?” 

“No.” Cythera’s fists were planted on her full hips. “Go back to my fool of a husband, Your Majesty, and let me return to getting your bride ready to walk down the aisle.” 

“I want to give this to Thayet.” Jon held up his mother’s necklace as if it were a shield from Cythera’s wrath. 

“Queen Lianne’s pearls.” Cythera’s jaw dropped as she gaped at the jewelry for a long moment. Then she gently scooped the necklace from Jon’s outstretched fingers and slipped back into the room where Thayet remained aggravatingly out of Jon’s reach. “I promise I’ll deliver the necklace to Thayet. Now please return to my dear husband some time before the wedding is supposed to start.” 

No sooner had Jon returned to the vestry where Gary and Raoul were waiting for him than Master Oakbridge, who appeared on the verge of a nervous collapse under the pressure of a royal wedding, bustled into the chamber and shepherded Jon and his best men onto the altar like lambs for sacrifice. 

Trying not to look at the the hundreds of nobles in their festive finery wedged into the pews, Jon focused instead on the dirt in his shoe, the ritual reminder of the realm his marriage was designed to serve. He would do his duty by his land and he would love Thayet with all his heart, he promised himself as four flower girls—Clarissa of Nond, Anastasia of Haryse, Brigid haMinch, and Eiralys of Cavall— in pink dresses entered the nave. 

They curtsied and began taking slow steps up the aisle, scattering lilies and lavenders from the baskets tucked on their arms. Each of the girls wore the tight, tentative smiles of children who were terrified of making a misstep, earning Master Oakbridge’s ire, and disgracing their families. To these lovely little girls being part of Thayet’s bridal party was probably more torture than honor even though he had seen Thayet sneaking the girls treats during the interminable rehearsals while Master Oakbridge was nitpicking the performance of other members of the wedding party. 

The flower girls, forced grins firmly in place, had arrived at the altar. Once again, they curtsied to him and then fanned around the altar as the ring-bearer, Graeme of Queenscove, entered the nave with a bow. His progress to the altar was swifter than that of the flower girls. After he had assumed his position behind Gary, Thayet stepped into the nave, the train of her gorgeous purple gown borne by Buri, Alanna, and Cythera. 

She glowed from the silver coronet on her head to the diamonds on her heeled shoes as she floated down the aisle toward Jon, a bouquet of lavenders and lilies blossoming between her palms. The scent of incense mingling with the aroma of the flowers wafting through the temple made Jon feel as if he had transcended to some supernatural plane where it was possible for him to marry the radiant Thayet. 

Her face serene—if her blood was thudding in her veins like a war drum and her nerves straining as Jon’s were, she hid her anxiety well—she joined him on the altar before High Priest Lucian and Archpriestess Danayne. 

“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here to celebrate the union of the body and soul before Mithros and the Goddess of Jonathan of Conte and Thayet jian Wilimia,” High Priest Lucian began to declaim. 

Jon was too lost in Thayet’s hazel eyes—which were fixed on him and only him as if, for a brief time, he was the sole person in her world—to listen to the High Priest expound on how the husband, strong and fair, was to embody the best qualities of Mithros in a marriage, or to the Archpriestess explain how the wife should emulate the Great Mother Goddess in her gentleness and mercy. Their words washed over him like waves over sand at high tide without him drinking in any of their substance, but the same did not seem to be true for Thayet. 

“I see you’re supposed to be the hard one while I’m encouraged to be the soft one,” she murmured, lips pursed, as they crossed the altar, arms linked, to light votive candles before statues of the Great Mother Goddess and Mithros. 

“You do make me hard, my dear, though not in the way the High Priest intended, I believe,” Jon whispered teasingly in her ear and thought he saw a faint blush bloom in her cheeks, which made him want to kiss her although that moment hadn’t arrived in the ceremony yet. 

He contented himself with brushing his fingers against hers as they lit the votive candles in front of Mithros and the Goddess. Then they knelt, and Jon found himself gazing at the splendor of Mithros—a golden sun shining around his head—as he wielded a sword of war in one fist and the scales of justice in the other hand. Mithros couldn’t hold his attention, however, because there was something captivating about the statue of the Great Mother Goddess with her beautiful breasts bared as she nursed a baby and balanced a toddler on her hip. She was soft, she was seductive, and she was nurturing…

“Are you in love with me, or do I have to compete with a stone woman, Jon?” hissed Thayet, tugging on his wrist in an indication that it was time to arise. 

Together they stood and returned to their spots before the High Priest and the Archpriestess. 

“Do you, Jonathan of Conte, take Thayet jian Wilimia to be your wife to love and to honor all the days of your life?” High Priest Lucian posed what Jon regarded as the most important question he had ever been asked. 

“I, Jonathan of Conte, take you, Thayet jian Wilimia, to be my wife to love and to honor all the days of my life.” Jon clasped Thayet’s wrists and was relieved that neither his hands nor his voice trembled because this was the time—the willing exchange of vows by the couple—when the marriage truly transpired. The hundreds of witnesses, the finery and the elaborate ceremony, the clergy and their blessings were all ultimately unnecessary accessories since the man and woman were the ones who really made the wedding in the eyes of the gods and the law. 

“Do you, Thayet jian Wilimia, take Jonathan of Conte to be your husband to love and honor all the days of your life?” The Archpriestess’ beady gaze riveted on Thayet. 

“I, Thayet jian Wilimia, take you, Jonathan of Conte, to be my husband to love and to honor all the days of my life.” Jon had never heard such miraculous words and now his hands did tremble at the knowledge that in the yes of the law, the gods, and his fellow mortals, he was married to Thayet. 

A quaking Graeme of Queenscove stepped around Gary to present a plush purple pillow with two golden rings set with a diamond apiece. 

“In the name of Mithros and the Goddess, so mote it be.” Jon took a ring and pressed it against Thayet’s index and pointer fingers before slipping it onto the ring finger. 

“In the name of Mithros and the Goddess, so mote it be.” Thayet echoed his words and gestures with the second ring. 

“You may now kiss the bride,” proclaimed the presiding priestess, and Jon did not need to be told twice. 

He leaned across the mere inches separating him from Thayet and slid his lips against hers. Her lips were challenging yet yielding, soft but calloused, warm and cool, at the same time in a way that felt complimentary rather than contradictory. That kiss, which he was confident he would remember until his last breath, was Thayet in a nutshell if she could be contained in something that small and limiting.


	10. The Wedding Night

The Wedding Night

Incense flooded the royal bedchamber and Thayet’s nostrils, dizzying her, as the priestesses of the Great Mother Goddess blessed the bedsheets, offering the traditional prayers for a fertile marriage. Thayet would have been impatient for them to get out and take their fumes with them if that didn’t mean being alone with her new husband. The thought of being alone with her husband promised pain to Thayet, and she was afraid now that they were unequals—that, despite how strongly she believed she had advocated for herself, she had failed in making them so. 

Too soon, the priestesses trailed out of the chamber in a stream of frankincense and curtsies. Jon seemed to feel the opposite emotion as Thayet, for, the instant the door shut behind the priestesses, Jon broke into an almost roguish grin as he remarked, “Thank the Goddess they’re gone.” 

Thayet’s face was too frozen for her to have returned the grin even if she had wanted to smile. Part of her was convinced that this would be the moment where his charming mask dropped, where he ripped off her clothes, and pushed her onto the bed, and thrust into her like a stallion mounting a mare. That was how most nobles in Sarain took their wives—so brutally that it couldn’t be called making love. 

When he didn’t make any move to force himself onto her but eyed her patiently, awaiting a response, she thumbed a pearl on the necklace he had given her, drawing courage from it as a sign that he cared about her as more than a mere breeder and murmured, “Thank you for the pearls, Jon. Cythera told me they were your mother’s.” 

“They were.” Sadness warred with happiness in Jon’s gaze as he stared at the necklace encircling her throat. “She would’ve wanted you to have them for our wedding.” 

“They’re beautiful.” Thayet was twisting a pearl so much that she worried it would separate from its string but she couldn’t control her hands. 

“You’re beautiful.” Jon’s eyes were sliding down from her throat—probably undressing her in his head—and if they weren’t wed Thayet would have slapped him. He stopped staring at her long enough to grab a decanter of wine from the night table. Pouring each of them a glass he held one out to her. “Wine, my dear?” 

“Thank you.” Remembering that wine was supposed to make the marriage act hurt less and maybe even be enjoyable, Thayet accepted the drink and hated how her shaking hands made the glass tremble so Jon could not avoid noticing her nerves. 

“You don’t have to be nervous, Thayet.” Jon’s hand curled gently around the fingers Thayet wasn’t using to hold the stem of her wine glass in a clutch so tight her knuckles whitened. 

“Easy for you to say.” Fear turned to anger inside Thayet’s chest, and her tone was more heated than she intended as she gulped down the liquid fire of her wine. “You’re the man. The marriage act doesn’t hurt you.” 

Jon winced as if her words were a punch to the jaw before softly squeezing her hand. “We may be married, but I swear to you by all the gods great and small that we won’t ever do the marriage act—as you call it—unless you want to, my dear.” 

Thayet appreciated the sentiment more than he would probably ever know but she had understood since childhood that for a royal woman sex was forbidden outside of marriage but mandatory within it. A queen who did not give her king and her country an heir would never be seen as doing her duty to her realm, and that condemnation would echo far beyond the marriage bed. 

“I’m your wife and your queen.” Thayet lifted her chin, reminding herself that she had sworn long ago that she wouldn’t cry on her wedding night no matter what happened. “I know my duty, and I will do it, Jon.” 

“I don’t want you to do it”—the emphasis Jon put on the word made it clear as crystal that he was referring to sex—“because of duty. I want you to do it because you want to do it.” Jon’s sapphire eyes shifted from serious to playful as he went on, “That doesn’t mean I won’t try to convince you to want it.” 

Before Thayet could regather her scattered wits enough to answer, he brought his lips to hers in a kiss that started gentle but rapidly rose to a feverish passion that made her nipples harden. As his tongue darted between her lips to tickle the insides of her cheeks and the roof of her mouth, exploring nooks and crannies that she had never noticed until he made her aware of how sensitive they were, she had to fight the urge to laugh for fear that it would spoil the moment. 

When he bared her breasts, she couldn’t bite back a gasp. She thought that he would touch her—her erect nipples were practically imploring him to—but he just gazed at them and that made Thayet recall how her father had always said her chest was too small and if her udders had been as large as her snout she would’ve been easier to marry off. 

“It’s rude to stare.” Thayet elbowed Jon’s ribs, drawing a groan from him. “I know they’re small.” 

“They aren’t small.” Jon’s palms cupped her breasts firmly, and Thayet thought they did fit in his hands comfortably. “They’re perfect. Who was crazy enough to tell you they’re too small?” 

“My father.” Thayet stared up at the crimson canopy above the bed because she was too ashamed—whether of her father’s crassness or her imagined ugliness, she couldn’t pinpoint—to meet Jon’s earnest eyes. 

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.” Jon couldn’t have been the only husband who delivered such an extravagant compliment to his wife on his wedding night, but still as Jon stroked her nipples, she felt beautiful. “If your father could only look at you and see flaws that says more about his ugliness than your beauty, Thayet.” 

Jon’s fingers had drifted down, making Thayet suddenly conscious of the dampness between her legs. He rubbed her mound and her whole body felt more alive than it ever had before. It was as if she had been asleep until he had awoken her with a stroke of her most private part. She pushed against him, moaning, “Jon…” 

“What do you want, dear?” Jon nipped at her neck. 

“I want you.” She thought she was being more than explicit as she shuddered with pleasure at what his hand was doing to the quivering folds between her legs. 

“You want me what?” Jon burned kisses into her breasts, his beard scratching her naked skin scarlet. 

“Inside me,” she panted, and that was finally enough for him. 

It ached when he eased into her, but he filled her in places she had never realized were empty, and desire drowned the pain.


	11. The Birthing Bed

The Birthing Bed

“I can’t!” wailed Cythera, whom Thayet had never heard do anything as undignified as cry before she went into labor so many bells ago that Thayet had lost count. There was no dignity in laboring to bring forth another life. There was only desperate wails, strained pants, and painful grinding of teeth to bite back more screams and sobs. 

“Don’t waste your breath crying, my lady.” The brisk advice came from Alicia, the highest-ranking female healer below Duke Baird, who presided over palace births as men were barred from the birthing room on the grounds that childbirth was one of the Goddess’ great mysteries, and who was working between Cythera’s spread legs. “Just put all your strength into pushing.” 

“I can’t,” repeated Cythera in a voice that was almost impossible to hear over the prayers of the priestess pacing the birthing chamber and the sound of one of Cythera’s ladies, Helena—Thayet believed that was her name anyway—who was sixteen and had just arrived from the convent, reading some poetry that was probably intended to be a comfort or at least a distraction from Cythera’s agony. 

“Stop with all this fuss and bother.” The imperious Duchess Roanna of Naxen rubbed a damp towel across Cythera’s sweaty forehead. “Just breathe and push.” 

“I’m going to die.” Cythera squeezed Thayet’s hand so hard her fingers went numb from Cythera’s fear, which she had whispered in Thayet’s ear after her water broke so many hours ago, that she would die in childbirth like her mother before he had giving life to a son when Cythera was only five. 

“Don’t be ridiculous—I thought my son had married a woman with brains to match her beauty and who was more than a pretty face,” snapped Duchess Roanna, continuing to mop her daughter-in-law’s brow. “You aren’t going to die. Now shut up and push as the healer says.” 

“I can see the crown of his head,” Alicia chimed in. “Keep pushing just a little longer and harder, and you will be richly rewarded, my lady.”

“Do you want me to get Gary?” Thayet stroked Cythera’s hand, which trembled like a leaf falling from a tree in autumn. She knew that many women did not want men to see that childbirth was as bloody and deadly a duty as warfare—they seemed to think it would dash their feminine mystique and ruin their womanly charm—but Thayet wondered if that was a mistake, and women would feel less alone in their suffering if their husbands were sweating alongside them. Assuming their husbands were good men, as Gary was. If their husbands were like her father, the farther they were from the birthing chamber, the better in Thayet’s opinion. 

“No.” Cythera’s eyes widened with horror as she gasped, “I can’t let Gary see me this way. I’m weak and ugly.” 

Horror appeared to do what the healer’s and Roanna’s orders and advice couldn’t for Cythera, face splotched scarlet with exertion, pushed out a baby who was as red-cheeked as herself. 

The healer smacked the baby’s bottom, and the baby squalled a protest at the first assault of a cruel world. Then she cut the cord connecting the child to mother, wrapped the baby in a lamb’s wool blanket, and tucked the swaddled baby in Cythera’s open arms. 

As Cythera, sobbing with what Thayet understood was a potent mixture of overwhelming joy, pain, and relief that her labor was finally over, clutched her newborn to her heaving chest, she asked breathlessly, “Boy or girl, Alicia?” 

“Boy,” answered Alicia, cracking what might have been her first weary grin since the onset of Cythera’s labor, “and a healthy one too. You can hear it in the pipes he’s got.” 

“Gilmyn.” Cythera beamed down at her son as she began to rock him, crooning words that belonged to no language that made him blink up at her with wonder. 

“Do you have childbed fever?” Roanna scowled. “What kind of nonsense name is Gilmyn?” 

“An old family name on my side.” Cythera was too absorbed with cradling her offspring to take umbrage at her mother-in-law’s bristling reaction to her son’s name. 

“In that case, I don’t know what your ancestors were thinking at the time.” Roanna’s tone was brusque but there was a tenderness in her usually sharp dark eyes as she ran a finger along her grandson’s apple cheeks. 

“I’ll get Gary now.” Abruptly realizing who was missing from this moving family moment, Thayet surged to her feet and made a beeline for the door into the next chamber, where Gary and his companions during his wife’s labor, awaited news with undoubted anxiety. 

“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Cythera was regaining her poise as Thayet stepped through the threshold into the next room, where the tension was still thick enough to slice with a dagger. 

“We heard wailing.” Jon, clutching Gary’s shoulders in a white-knuckled grip, was the first to speak as Thayet entered. “Is something wrong?” 

“No.” Thayet smiled as she directed her next words to Gary, “Mother and son are healthy and happy, Sir Gareth.” 

“Praise be to the Goddess.” Gary seemed to fold in on himself with relief. 

“I did tell you everything would be fine.” Duke Gareth pounded his cane against the floor to emphasize his point. “I did know what I was talking about, but sons never listen to their fathers, as you’re about to learn, son.” 

“I only refuse to listen on principle, Father, when you act as if you know everything,” countered Gary, his characteristic crispness returning. Glancing at Jon, he added, “Your Majesty will do us the honor of being godsfather?” 

“For the thousandth time, yes.” Jon was emanating a wild elation and fierce pride that suggested he was the new father, and, for the first time, Thayet looked at her husband and thought that he would make a good father. 

An hour later, after Gilmyn had been admired until he fell asleep, Jon murmured in the shell of Thayet’s ear as they walked back to their quarters at last, “I’m going to be a godsfather. That means I get to perform all the fun parts of being a father—showering a child with gifts and compliments—without any of the unpleasantness of trying to be stern and strict. Speaking of gifts, what present should I bestow upon young Gilmyn?” Before Thayet could offer a suggestion, Jon’s gaze sparkled with mischief. “I’d give Gilmyn a dukedom if the Naxens didn’t already have one.” 

“You’d sign our kingdom away if a baby looked at you imploringly enough,” teased Thayet, rolling her eyes, but inside she was happy to have a husband who was a soft touch with children. If she had daughters with Jon, he would not humiliate them with constant allusions to their worthlessness and hideousness as Thayet’s father had shamed her for her sex and her K’miri heritage. Jon would be a good father because he was driven to be, Thayet could feel it in her bones, and for now at least, she was grateful that she had married him.


	12. The Broken

The Broken

Though the fire burned brightly against the dark chill of the late March night in the bedchamber he shared with Thayet, Jon felt as if he were still in the crypts, solemnly commemorating the year that had passed since his father’s death. The wool blankets wrapped around him were shrouds, and the curtains hanging over the four-poster bed were his tomb. 

“You didn’t have to come to the ceremony, you know, my dear.” Jon reached out to rest his palm over Thayet’s and was reminded of how his parents’ tombs were designed so they were laying side-by-side and holding hands in death as they had in life. 

“I know. You told me that this morning.” Thayet squeezed his fingers between her warm ones. “I’m your wife, Jon. It’s my duty to stand by you while you mourn your parents.” 

“We barely finished commemorating my mother when we had to repeat the rite for my father.” Jon’s jaw clenched, and, for the hundredth time, he violated all the sacred laws of filial obligation by resenting his father for selfishly committing suicide and piling grief upon grief and loss upon loss for his family. Uncle Gareth, who needed a cane to walk now that his heart had weakened from all the tears it had sustained in the last year, had not entered his father’s mind, nor had Gary, who laughed less now that he ran the kingdom as much as Jon did. Nor had Jon, who had to control a realm thrust into chaos by the choices his father had made near the end of his reign. His father had thought not of the living but of the dead when he rode off a cliff, and Jon didn’t know if he could ever fully forgive the man he had once admired more than any other for that. “Nobody could expect you to perform the rituals twice in three weeks for people you’d never met.” 

“I expect to endure any difficulty you do without flinching.” Thayet’s hazel eyes were so fierce—but somehow so staunchly comforting—that Jon doubted she would ever recoil from anything in their marriage. “I will be strong for you through the good and the bad.” 

“I appreciate that more than you could ever realize.” Gently Jon brought her fingers to his lips for a lingering kiss that assured him there was still some sweetness in a country ravaged by a cruel famine. “I just regret that there has been more bad than good these past three weeks.” 

“The K’miri say that bad things come in threes, but then the Horse Lords reward our suffering with a blessing.” Thayet stroked his cheek with the hand he wasn’t lavishing with his love, and hope stirred inside him at the sight of it swelling in her gaze. Her eyes were his cornerstone, the firm foundation preventing him from crumbling under the pressures of kingship and the despair of losing his parents. 

“From your lips”—Jon brushed his across hers—“to the Horse Lords’ ears. We could use a blessing.” 

He thought about how they—Uncle Gareth, Aunt Roanna, Cythera, Gary, Thayet, and him, because, thanks be to the merciless Black God, such services were for family, not the public—had prayed in the crypts with votive candles for the Black God to grant every mercy and joy upon his father. They had shared stories of his father’s peacefulness, kindness, and clemency and not mentioned how his mildness, his excess of compassion, and his mercy for a traitor to kin, king, and country had almost carried the realm off a cliff with him. They had relived the good times to avoid the troubles that he had left them with, but Jon still heard the unspoken resentments that tainted the love of even those closest to his father. He had understood more clearly than ever that a king’s legacy wasn’t in what he did while he was alive but in what shape he left his kingdom when he departed his lie. Jon was resolved that he would never leave his realm in shambles. He would be strong and leave the country a better place than when he inherited it, no matter how daunting a prospect that seemed in the midst of this famine that was tightening all their belts and that he couldn’t abate even by going into dreadful debt. 

“The realm could use a blessing.” Jon’s bitterness seeped out of him before he could bite his tongue against it. “It seems as if the country has been cursed since my father died. Perhaps the gods are displeased by his suicide and are punishing us for his offense.” 

“You mustn’t blame your father for his suicide.” Thayet shook her head, pressed against Jon’s, so her silk hair tickled his cheek. 

“Why not?” Jon coiled his hand in her hair, admiring the way it curled like rings around his fingers. “His suicide wasn’t defiance like your mother’s, dear. His was all about giving up when he was needed most.” 

“He was broken by betrayal and by the death of the woman he loved.” Thayet whispered the words into the shell of Jon’s ear, which flamed with mingled shame and desire. “He wanted so desperately to be while again and knew that only being with his wife once more could make him whole.” 

Before Jon could have a prayer of mustering a reply to this pronouncement, she was trailing kisses along his jawline and then his collarbone, murmuring, “You’re broken too, Jon. Let me make you whole again as you did when I fled here from Sarain.” 

Then she was on top of him, guiding him inside her soothing heat. It was the first time that she had initiated anything more intense than cuddling between them—she responded to his advances rather than making her own in marriage as she had in courtship—and Jon knew that he would treasure the memory for the rest of his life. He felt something quicken between them in a way it hadn’t even on their wedding night. It was as if they were forging a new life together in the iron of their joined grief and as if in their brokenness they had made one another whole.


	13. The Heartbeat

The Heartbeat

Jon was preparing for bed when a retching sound suddenly filled the bedchamber he shared with Thayet. Turning away from the dresser, he saw his wife hunched over a silver wash basin, vomiting up the little dinner that she had nibbled upon that evening. He frowned at the sight of her sickness. For the past week, Thayet hadn’t eaten much, and now apparently she was unable to keep down whatever scant sustenance her diminished appetite allowed her to consume. That would not do at all. 

“Thayet, you don’t look so good.” Draping his arm around Thayet’s heaving shoulders as she finished throwing up into the basin, Jon intended the comment to be sympathetic but plainly she interpreted it as a criticism. 

“I’m sorry you find me disgusting.” Thayet stiffened in his grasp in a way that said louder than words could have that she did not want to be vulnerable around him even if she had just spattered a basin with the smelly contents of her stomach. 

“I don’t find you disgusting.” To prove it, Jon pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and used it to gingerly wipe Thayet’s lips and chin clean. “I’m just worried about you, dear. You haven’t been hungry for a week, and now you can’t keep down what little you do eat.” 

“It’s just a stomachache.” Thayet, leaning into his chest, was starting to relax into his embrace, and Jon might have smiled if he wasn’t so concerned about her mysterious ailment. 

“I’ll have Duke Baird summoned to check that it isn’t anything more serious than a stomachache, and I’ll have a servant tidy up this mess.” Jon nodded at the dirty basin. Gesturing at their bed, he added, “Why don’t you sit down, darling?” 

She took his suggestion, sinking onto the soft mattress, and he stepped out into the hallway, where he dispatched a manservant with a message for Duke Baird to come to the royal bedchamber at once and ordered a passing maid to clean up Thayet’s sickness. 

“Duke Baird will be here soon,” Jon assured his wife, who had wrapped the blankets about her though the nights were warming now that it was April, as the maid bustled out of the bedchamber with the basin. 

“He’ll say it’s just a stomachache, Jon.” Thayet poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher on their nightstand. “There’s nothing he can do about a stomachache.” 

“I just want to be sure.” Jon settled beside her and kissed her forehead. “Seeing you sick worries me.” 

Before Thayet could respond, there was a sound of throat-clearing in the doorway, and when Jon craned his neck, he was greeted by a bowing Duke Baird. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Majesties.” 

“It’s no intrusion if you’re answering a summons, Your Grace.” Jon didn’t wish to waste any more time on formalities, so he went on in a rush, “Her Majesty has been suffering with a stomachache for a week, and this evening she was sick. I want to know it is indeed merely a stomachache that ails her.” 

“Very well.” Duke Baird nodded and approached the bed with outstretched hands. His palms hovering over Thayet’s abdomen, he asked, “With your permission, Your Majesty?” 

At Thayet’s nod, he rested his hands over her stomach, and Jon could see the emerald strands of his Gift stretching from his fingers into Thayet, probing her for signs of the severity of her sickness. 

Whatever he sensed made Duke Baird’s forehead furrow. Every nerve inside him on edge about what could be wrong with his wife, Jon demanded, “What ails her, Your Grace? Is it more serious than a simple stomachache?” 

“It’s more serious than a stomachache, but don’t despair, sire.” Duke Baird’s face was sliding into a smile, and Jon couldn’t understand what could provoke such a reaction from a healer who had an otherwise impeccable bedside manner. “Nothing is wrong with her that won’t be cured within nine months. Her Majesty is pregnant.” 

Jon’s mind couldn’t make sense of the final word Duke Baird had uttered. He had prayed for a child to bring joy to him and his wife, hope to his beleaguered country, and stability to his tenuous reign, but he hadn’t expected the gods to favor him and Thayet with a baby only a year into their marriage. He was frozen with a mixture of inexpressible happiness and an unspeakable terror. He and Thayet were doing to bring a new life into the world, but he wasn’t confident that he was ready to be a father. What if he failed as a father, disappointing in his most important duty to his family and to his kingdom, neglecting to raise a child even better than himself? 

Perhaps equally stunned, Thayet gasped, “Pregnant? I missed my cycle this month, but I thought that was just stress…” 

There was no need to ask what stressed her for the pressures of their reforms and the famine were a constant headache for both of them. 

“How far along is she?” Jon was beginning to accept the fact that Thayet was carrying a child inside her and so craved more information about that life growing within her. 

“About six weeks I would guess from how the baby feels inside her, Your Majesty,” replied Duke Baird, and Jon wondered if the child had been conceived on the anniversary of his father’s death when Thayet had made love to him, and he had felt something quicken between them as it never had before. Maybe he had managed to sense the life taking to her womb. 

Fixing his attention on Thayet, Duke Baird observed gently, “Many women find that morning sickness comes at all hours of the day and night when they are pregnant. I’ll leave Your Majesty some herbs for tea to soothe your stomach at such times. Be assured, though, that the baby inside you is strong and healthy. Also know that you and your baby will receive the best care the palace healers can provide.” 

“Thank you, Your Grace.” Regaining her composure, Thayet inclined her head in a gracious nod. 

Once Duke Baird had given Thayet bags of herbs for tea along with instructions in their use, Jon said before the chief healer could take his leave, “Please keep your knowledge of Her Majesty’s condition confidential until the official court announcement, Your Grace.” 

“Of course.” Duke Baird bowed deeply first to Jon and then to Thayet. “Your Majesties can always rely on my utmost discretion in all matters.” 

After Duke Baird had departed, closing the door firmly in his wake to provide Jon and Thayet with much needed privacy, Thayet murmured, resting her palms over her abdomen, “I’m going to be a mother. I never believed it would happen so quickly.” 

“We have been blessed by the gods.” Jon squeezed his fingers over Thayet’s. “The whole realm will say the same when we release our joyous news. They will celebrate not just because a royal baby is born, but because it’s a sign that the gods are favoring the country again.” 

“A baby changes everything,” whispered Thayet almost reverently. “Our child could bring so much rejoicing to our entire kingdom.” 

Longing to touch his child on whom the hopes and future of his whole realm seemed to rest as he did his wife, Jon reached out with his Gift. He was rewarded with the feeling of a heartbeat that was neither his nor Thayet’s. It was small but strong, the most comforting and promising sensation Jon had ever felt. It was the quietly powerful pulse of life itself. 

“I can feel the baby’s heartbeat.” Jon breathed in Thayet’s ear, wishing to share the magic with her. “It has a music to it like the waves of an ocean.” 

“I’ve always loved the ocean.” Thayet’s smile was almost wistful. “I like the idea of having an ocean inside me, Jon.”


	14. The Doubt and the Promise

The Doubt and the Promise

“Jon.” Alone with her husband away from the prying eyes of the courtiers in the bedchamber they shared, Thayet hated the almost imperceptible quaver in her voice for betraying the lack of confidence that had plagued her since her pregnancy starting showing. Before she had conceived, she had been convinced that carrying the king’s child in her womb would imbue her with more authority, but instead she felt vulnerable, as if all her beauty had been replaced with bloat. She didn’t like to think that her self-esteem was in any way dependent upon her appearance, but as her body swelled, she had to confront the awful possibility that it was. Hoping that she wouldn’t lose her dignity by crying and turn her fattening face red with tears, she went on, trying to be poised and not pitifully pleading, “I need you to promise me something.” 

“What, dear?” Jon must have detected her distress for he lifted a hand to cup her cheek in gentle encouragement. 

His soft touch made it even harder for Thayet to continue, her chin quivering along with her tone, “Please promise that when you take a mistress, you won’t parade her in front of the court or me.” 

Thayet would never forget the shame she and her mother had felt when her father pranced his mistresses about like prize ponies at a fair. She thought that she could maintain a sliver of pride if her husband didn’t humiliate her by flaunting his unfaithfulness before the entire court. 

“I can’t promise you that, Thayet, because I’m never going to take a mistress.” A frown furrowed Jon’s forehead. “I had other women before I met you, I admit it, but, since we started courting, I’ve been faithful to you, and I always will be.” 

“You say that now.” Thayet’s jaw clenched as she resisted the urge to cry over the memory of the pretty promises her father would make when he had his brief surges of remorse for the disgraceful manner in which he treated his wife and daughter. “But all men betray their wives. It’s in their nature.” 

“Who told you that?” There was suppressed thunder in Jon’s voice. 

“My father.” Thayet bit her lip, and the pain kept her from tears. 

“Your father didn’t speak for all men. Nothing about being a man necessitates being unfaithful to one’s wife. He was just blaming his gender for his own failings, abdicating his responsibility for his bad behavior that tore his family apart.” Jon shook his head. “My father never betrayed my mother. He loved and respected her too much to ever take a mistress.” 

“You’ve said that your father’s love of your mother was unhealthy,” pointed out Thayet, folding her hands together so that he wouldn’t see they were trembling. 

“It was healthy of him to be faithful to her and to treat her with love and respect. That’s something I’ll always honor him for and wish to emulate.” Jon massaged his temples as if untangling where his respect of his father bittered into resentment gave him a migraine. “It’s the riding off a cliff bit that I’ll strive to avoid.” 

“My father wasn’t faithful to my mother.” Thayet found it difficult to meet Jon’s bright blue gaze even if she saw only compassion there. “He said she got ugly after they married, letting herself go as he put it, and now I’m getting ugly too.” 

Ugly was how Thayet perceived herself when she dared to look in a mirror these days. Her stomach, which made her sick several times a day (only adding to her ugliness), had swelled. Her ankles, which always ached from carrying her bloated body around, seemed thick enough to be confused with her thighs. Her face was fattening, and her breasts were sagging with new weight that hurt. 

“You’re not getting ugly.” Jon squeezed her fingers between his own. “You’re more beautiful than when we married. You’re carrying our child inside you, Thayet. Nothing could make you more attractive to me than that.” 

“You’re flattering me, Jon.” Thayet’s laugh was too hysterical, bordering on tears. 

“No, I’m not.” Jon’s grip on her fingers tightened so that it was almost fierce. “I’m speaking the truth, but even if you weren’t as beautiful as you were on our wedding day, that wouldn’t matter to me. I married you hoping that we would grow old together, not that time would freeze you in that one moment.” 

Finally Thayet believed him. Sometimes her husband could be shallow as a puddle, but his passions could be deep as the Emerald Ocean as well, and she could hear the deep passion and the determination to love her faithfully forever in his tone. 

“I’m sorry.” She ducked her head, her black hair forming a curtain around her flushing face. “You’ve given me no cause to doubt you.” 

“And I won’t ever.” Jon leaned in to brush his lips across hers, his beard tickling her chin. “That’s my promise to you.” 

“Good.” Thayet returned the kiss with mounting fervor. “You’ve proven that I shouldn’t doubt your faithfulness. Now prove that I shouldn’t doubt my beauty.” 

“How would you like me to do that?” Jon’s kiss, which had begun gently, had become ardent. 

“You haven’t been inside me since you found out I was pregnant.” Thayet trailed her fingers under his tunic, drawing strength from the muscles in his chest. He was solid, and he was hers. “That’s why I thought you saw me as ugly and would seek out a mistress.” 

“Gods, no.” Jon’s palms played with her breasts, and Thayet felt breathless—part of her had expected pain to fill her tender breasts at his touch, but she felt only desire. She was melting like warm butter beneath his ministrations. “I just didn’t want to hurt you.” 

“You’ve never hurt me.” Thayet smiled as his hand slipped down her stomach to stroke between her legs. “I don’t think you’ll start now.”


	15. The Living Legacy

The Living Legacy

Thayet was broken and bleeding. Among the lowlanders of Sarain, it was a truism that while men bled and broke on the battlefield, women bled and broke in childbirth. Thayet had bled and broke on the battlefield, but as the pains of labor tore through her, she thought that childbirth was ripping her apart in a way war never had. 

She screamed and wept—clutching onto Buri’s and Cythera’s hands so tightly she probably shattered fingers but they clung to her throughout her ordeal without complaint—until her throat was sore. It was only when she didn’t have the strength to sob that the healer—Alicia, who guided Cythera through Gilmyn’s birth and who answered only to Duke Baird—cried out that she could see a crown and Thayet had only to push a little harder to bring the new life into the world. 

Thayet panted, sweated, and pushed with a ferocity she was surprised to find inside her. More blood came out of her, and she wondered frantically if all she would give birth to was blood before a slick baby fell into Alicia’s outstretched palms. 

Cradling the baby, who was silent and not crying at the violent entry into the world, Alica cleaned the moisture from the newborn’s mouth and nostrils, opening clogged airways. 

“Boy or girl?” rasped Thayet, wanting to know everything about this life that had just clawed out of her womb. 

“A son, Your Majesty.” Alicia was radiant as she washed the baby in a basin, turning the water crimson, and Thayet knew that she foreshadowed the realm’s reaction. Everyone would rejoice in her husband’s heir, a secure succession in the event of a disaster. “He seems the strong and silent type if you’ll pardon my saying so.” 

“Roald.” Thayet spoke the name as firmly as she could when collapsed into a mound of pillows. Neither of them superstitious about naming their children after suicides, she and Jon had agreed to honor Thayet’s mother if the baby was a girl and Jon’s father should the child be a boy. 

Roald, who seemed so small to have ripped Thayet apart from top to toe, still had not cried, and, as if to prompt this, Alicia turned him over and lifted her hand over his tiny, vulnerable bottom…

“Don’t hit him,” snapped Thayet, feeling the first fury of a mother whose offspring was threatened. 

“I forgot myself, Your Majesty.” Alicia bobbed a curtsy as she offered Roald, now sobbing at the noise around him, to Thayet, who rocked him gently, crooning nonsense words she hoped would convince him to stop wailing. “Of course nobody who isn’t royalty may strike a prince. I just wished to make sure he was breathing properly.” 

Alicia seemed to believe that it was a person of her rank hitting Roald rather than the notion of anyone doing so that Thayet had objected to, but Thayet felt too exhausted to correct her. 

“Thank you for your service.” Thayet waved a weary palm in dismissal. “You’ll receive a gold purse from my husband for this.” 

“I’ll lead her out.” Cythera rose from a chair beside Thayet’s birthing bed. Curtsying, she and Alicia departed, Cythera adding over her shoulder, “I’ll tell His Majesty that he may come in to see you now.” 

Thayet nodded her gratitude as Buri shot the quieting baby curled against Thayet’s breasts a stern look, remarking curtly, “He hurt you. If you ask me, a spanking wouldn’t have been amiss.” 

“Nobody is ever going to spank him.” Adamant in protecting her son, Thayet shook her head. 

“Cythera and Alicia had the right idea about scuttling out of here before you could chop off their heads.” Buri snorted as she crossed over to the door. “I’ll leave you to dote over your baby without any rude reality interruptions from irritable me.” 

“You’re to be his godsmother.” Thayet didn’t know where she found the breath to laugh. “You should be encouraging me to dote on him.” 

“He’s a prince who’ll be king one day.” Buri’s hand gripped the doorframe with white knuckles as she hovered in the threshold. “I refuse to fawn over him just because he was born. That’d set him on the path of becoming a spoiled prince, and spoiled princes become tyrannical kings. Another tyrannical king is never what the world needs.” 

Staring down at Roald after Buri left, Thayet could see no trace of spoiled prince or tyrannical king in her son. There was only innocence in the wide blue eyes she hoped wouldn’t change as she had heard could happen with babies. She wished for him to have inherited Jon’s eyes. Beneath Jon’s eyes, her K’miri nose was planted, and, though she had always been ashamed of hers since her father had mocked it as proof of her savage ancestry, she was proud of it when she saw it on him. This handsome little boy wrapped in a blanket as blue as his eyes combined what was best in her and Jon, giving new and dynamic expression to those traits. He was the better future she and Thayet could forge made flesh, the breathing embodiment of their desire to leave the world a brighter place than it had been when they entered it. 

She didn’t notice Jon come into the room until she felt the mattress sag under his weight as he slipped in beside her. 

“Our child,” whispered Jon. His finger trembled as he stroked Roald’s smooth cheek. His reverence made Thayet smile. “He’s perfect. May I hold him, Thayet?” 

When she hesitated, wanting to hold onto her son forever, Jon kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, dear. I promise not to break him.” 

Thayet carefully slid Roald from her arms into Jon’s waiting one. Roald agreeably rolled into a ball so that he became easier to hold. As he cradled their son, Jon reached out a still shaking finger, and Roald instinctively grasped it, his fist so small that it didn’t even swallow his father’s finger. 

“Such a strong baby.” Jon’s beam was the broadest Thayet had ever seen it. She believed he would be a good father but the pounding heart in her chest craved certainty. 

“You won’t hit him, will you, Jon?” Thayet leaned her head against Jon’s shoulder. 

“Alicia said you panicked when she tried to spank Roald.” Jon tilted his lips to murmur into the shell of her ear. “She just wanted to ensure he was breathing properly. He is. There’s no need for anyone to spank him now. Calm down, dear.” 

“I don’t mean now.” Thayet fixed her hazel eyes on his sapphire ones so he could see how serious she was. “I mean ever. I don’t want you ever spanking him.” 

“He’s a baby.” Jon’s finger had somehow ended up in Roald’s mouth, where Roald was suckling on it as enthusiastically as if it were a nipple. “I’m not thinking about spanking him. It would be twisted if I were doing that. What do you expect—that I’m looking forward to the first time he breaks a rule so I can swat his little bottom?” 

“I expect you not to dodge the issue.” Thayet would have elbowed him if he wasn’t holding their baby. “You know I hate it when you beat around the bush.” 

“My father never spanked me.” Jon smiled down at the son who continued to suck on his finger and maybe part of his smile was for his own father. “He was always very gentle with me. Of course, that could be how I became what so many people call arrogant.” 

“You’re a good man.” Thayet spoke fervently because he was despite the flaws he worked so hard to overcome. “Your father was right not to hit you. My father hit me, and it didn’t make me respect him, just fear and resent him.” 

“I don’t want my son to fear or resent me.” Jon brushed his lips across the nimbus of black hair on Roald’s head. “I think I should be sterner with him than my father was with me but if I hit him I could turn him into a tyrant when I just don’t want him to be as spoiled a prince as I was. There are ways to discipline without hitting, and that’s what I promise to do, Thayet.” 

“Thank you, Jon.” Thayet’s throat was so tight it was difficult for her to talk. “You’ll be a great father.” 

“I have to be.” Jon rocked Roald. “I must raise my heir to be a better man than myself, not just for you, him, or me, but for the whole kingdom. This is the noblest feeling I’ve ever had, staring down at my son and being determined to mold him into a better person and a better king than I’ll ever be. If I succeed at that, he’ll be my living legacy. If I fail, nothing else I achieve matters.” 

“You won’t fail.” Thayet pecked his cheek. “Not with me by your side.”


	16. Epilogue: Castle in the Sand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is finished just in time to ring in the new year. Yay. I hope everyone else enjoyed the journey with Jon and Thayet as much as I did.

Epilogue: Castle in the Sand

Jon sprawled on a blanket spread over the sand on a beach outside of Port Caynn. In front of him shone the seaweed green waters of the Emerald Ocean and behind him the gray crags of the coastal hills stretched like Tortall’s rocky spine. Beside him sat Thayet, pregnant with the promise of their third child, while Kally toddled around, searching for shells. Whenever she found one she judged particularly appealing, she would squeal with glee and dart over to show her parents the marvelous shape or colors of the shell, interrupting the important conversation Jon and Thayet were trying to have with Gary and Cythera, who lounged on another blanket, about the state of the realm, which was still mostly poor and famished. 

“Gilmyn!” Cythera’s shout intruded upon Gary’s discussion of how an uptick in Port Caynn’s exports this year could mitigate some of the exorbitant cost of the massive amount of grain that needed to be imported to feed the kingdom’s starving people. Craning his neck to figure out what had provoked Cythera’s strong reaction, Jon saw Gilmyn and Roald prodding with sticks of driftwood at something the waves had washed onto the shore. “What are you poking?” 

“A fish, Mama,” Gilmyn called cheerily, oblivious to how disgusting it was to be jabbing sticks at what Jon could only imagine was the rotting remains of a festering fish. “He won’t move no matter how hard we poke him.” 

“Probably because he’s dead,” Gary muttered under his breath. “If he wasn’t dead when he washed ashore, the prodding will have killed him.” 

“He just stares,” Roald added to Gilmyn’s report with utmost earnestness. “His scales are falling off, and he smells.” 

“Go play with something that doesn’t smell, Roald,” suggested Thayet. “Why don’t you build a sand castle?” 

“Yes, Mama.” Obediently Roald dropped his stick and ran off to build a castle in a place where Jon thought it might be vulnerable to crashing under a high wave, but he decided to let Roald learn this by discovery since he couldn’t cultivate the spirit of exploration by allowing Roald to examine the decaying fish. 

Gilmyn didn’t join Roald in building the sand castle, but instead remained fascinated by the dead fish, continuing to poke at it with his stick. 

“We’d better go distract our little monster,” grumbled Gary, pushing himself off his blanket. 

“He loves to jump in the waves with us holding his hands.” Cythera rose alongside her husband. “Excuse us, Your Majesties.” 

Gary and Cythera managed to coax Gilmyn away from the dead fish and into the ocean, where he laughed and yelped as they held his hands to help him leap over the incoming waves. 

Tranquility reigned for mere moments before a powerful surge of water swept Roald’s castle into the ocean. Roald burst into tears, and Jon would have felt sympathy for his son—it was heartbreaking to pour everything into a castle made with sand that crumbled into the ocean—if Roald’s sorrow hadn’t quickly darkened into anger. Howling his frustration, Roald hurled fistfuls of damp sand into the ocean. 

“Don’t throw sand, Roald,” Thayet scolded. When Roald ignored her, persisting in tossing handfuls of sand in the air, she attempted to redirect his energies. “Why don’t you rebuild your castle farther up the beach where the waves can’t knock it over?” 

“No!” Roald started kicking at the sand instead of just pitching it with his hands. 

Roald was in the midst of a stubborn stage in which he took pleasure in saying no to everybody from nursemaids to his parents, and Jon was not about to tolerate such bratty behavior from the heir who would inherit his country. 

“He’ll take his eyes out if he’s not careful.” Jon swapped an exasperated glance with his wife before marching through the sand with as much dignity as the shifting surface would permit. 

Planting his hands on his hips, Jon stared down at his son, who froze as Jon’s shadow fell over him. 

“Stop throwing sand, son,” he ordered sternly, though Roald had already ceased his antics. 

Scooping up Roald so their eyes would meet and his son could see how seriously Jon took his tantrum, he went on as firmly as he could without yelling, “When your mama tells you to do something, you do it. You don’t ever say no to her when she wants you to do anything. That’s rude, and a son should never be rude to his mama.” 

“Yes, Papa.” Roald’s eyes were wet and wide as the ocean at this strict reprimand. “Sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize to me.” Jon shook his head. “It’s your mama you need to apologize to, Roald.” 

“Yes, Papa.” Roald nodded miserably and called, “Sorry, Mama.”

Thayet blew Roald a kiss as a sign of her forgiveness. Jon might have smiled if Roald, who craved comfort after even mild scolding, hadn’t buried his face in Jon’s shoulder. Rubbing his palm through his son’s hair and dislodging sand, he murmured, “I know it’s hard to put everything you have into something only to watch it fall, but you can’t lose your temper. You just have to rebuild. Why don’t you do that farther up the beach like Mama said?” 

“Don’t want to.” Roald chewed his lip. “Want to build castle with a moat.” 

“You need the ocean for a moat, I see.” Jon patted his son’s sandy cheek. “It’d be easier to bring the ocean to the moat rather than build the castle near the waves.” 

“Papa?” Roald frowned in confusion. 

“Use a bucket, Roald.” Jon grinned as he set his son back on the beach. “Dig a hole around the castle for a moat, fill a bucket with water, and dump the water in the hole. Then you’ll have your moat.” 

“That’s a good idea, Papa.” Roald was twitching with excitement to implement the plan. 

“Your mama and I are filled with good ideas.” Jon squeezed Roald’s shoulder as he headed back to the blanket. “That’s why you should listen to us, son.” 

As he slipped beside her, Thayet laced her fingers between his and commented just loudly enough to be heard over the cawing gulls, “You’re a good father to our children, Jon. I love you.” 

It was the first time she had ever said those words to him, and Jon knew he would treasure the memory well into his senility. He had begun to believe that he would never hear them from her, and that he would have to be content with the love she demonstrated in her actions and other words. Hearing her state her love for him so plainly almost made him believe in happily ever after for them, but he knew that with Thayet happily ever after meant them both working hard to love one another and make each other better for the rest of their days. For them, love wasn’t a happy ending; it was a hopeful beginning. 

“I love you too.” He kissed her lips which tasted of the salty air rippling their hair. “Now and forever, Thayet.”


End file.
